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“You have brought the sickness:” HIV and a woman’s plight

By Lungi Langa

I was recently paging through a back-copy of the Big Issue magazine when an article titled Teen love gets more complicated, caught my attention. It told the story of a teenager who was born HIV positive. She found out about her status when she was thirteen years old.

Because she had been a sickly child, her mother knew every witch doctor around and took her to all of them.

Her father was also sick, convincing her mother that they were both bewitched, probably by one person. After her father died, the girl’s health continued to deteriorate until she was referred to a health facility where both she and her mother were tested and diagnosed with HIV.