The Healing Touch

Chandrika speaks for MILANA

Positive & Living Exhibition

Painting the town red on World AIDS Day!

In the backdrop of the World AIDS Day, December 1st 2008, a photo exhibition, titled Positive & Living, is underway in Bengaluru (Bangalore). To reach out to the young and urban crowd, one of the most popular and upmarket shopping malls in Bangalore was chosen as the display venue. The Forum Mall visitors were surprised to see creatively displayed images and testimonies amidst global fashion brands and cafeterias. The stars of the exhibition, the HIV positive women from family support network of MILANA, got together with young management students, singing and doing skits to engage people for spreading awareness and dispelling the myth that infected people did not have a life to live or a future to look forward to.

My name is Chandrika....

I have been HIV positive for the last 11 years.

I would not have been here, had I not come across MILANA. I was introduced to this family support network of HIV positive people by a doctor. When the test results for HIV status were done I was not told that we were HIV positive. I was instead told that all of us - me, my husband and my baby - have AIDS and we won’t live more than three months.

Hearing this we had decided to commit suicide...and then MILANA happened.

Jyoti madam, coordinator and founder of the group, came to us and counseled us. She touched us when no one was ready to touch us. In MILANA, conversation, touch, hug, love and affection is very important.


I realized that I could also live courageously with my son.

My marriage was a love marriage. But it was an inter-cast wed-lock. My husband was a Malayali and I am a Gowda. So no one agreed to our marriage. My husband committed suicide.

My son’s name is Vinod. He is 10 years old. He is very naughty. During such moments I feel saddened. Then I pull myself together and tell myself that I must look after him very nicely as long as he lives. I want to give him whatever he asks for.

Since he is taking the second line ART, his health condition is good. He knows that he is HIV positive.

In MILANA I got training to become a nurse. I also learned that I can work for people. I also came to know that we can fight for our rights as people affected with HIV.

ActionAid is the founder of the group and there is a good co-ordination between us and members of ActionAid. They often take part on our planning and discussions and tell us how to face this life, how to fight for our rights.

We carry forward this work by learning what are rights as people living with HIV, what are our human rights, what we must do to get it and what kind of atrocities are taking place in ART centers.

A life less ordinary

Meena’s Profile

The afternoon air inside the small second-floor room is heavy. A pensive group of women is huddled around 34-year-old Meena, who has broken into a stream of tears.

This is in a sharp contrast to a morning that began with cheerful songs of hope and resolve.

"I remarried recently, 10 years after losing my first husband to HIV. Some say my decision to remarry is not a wise one,” Meena says.

“I have been battling the infection that killed my husband. Still I took the step of marrying someone who is HIV positive,” she adds.

The scene changes in a matter of few minutes and once again a song is sung in high pitch, dimming the blaring traffic outside on the road in India’s silicon city of Bangalore.

Meena is mother of four and has been HIV positive for over a decade now. When her husband passed away, she was ostricised, left alone to face the stigma and daily struggle to keep herself and her children alive.

Life changed for her five years ago when she found herself amidst a group of women brimming with confidence.

They were talking about bank accounts, ration cards, positive living and, most importantly for Meena, how to live as equals in the community with the status of HIV positive on their sleeve.

Today as she makes her way through to her one room home on the outskirts of the state capital of Karnataka, her neighbours look at her with respect.

Her new role as a peer counselor with the family network of HIV positive people has given her reason to fight for her dignity and allow other women living with HIV and AIDS to make a similar choice.

“MILANA is like a family to me. Its members are like relatives. It saved me from death and gave strength to face the world,” she says.

ActionAid supported MILANA has grown from five families to 300 families and has a batch of 20 peer counselors reaching out to HIV positive people. It provides, apart from psycho-social care, home-based counseling, skill training and nutritional support.