Getting the HIV/AIDS message across

A report from the field by Elena Rue, who is working with Hope For Children in Addis Ababa. This is part of a series of vignettes by students documenting the work of BvLF partners as part of the Hine Fellowships project, a collaboration between BvLF and the Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative.

Please note that reports from Hine Fellows published on this website constitute their own personal impressions and in no way represent the official positions of their host organisation, the Bernard van Leer Foundation or the Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative.

During the last three months I have been working alongside photographer Eric Gottesman. Eric, in collaboration with Hope for Children, has spent the last six years documenting the stories of people infected with HIV and orphans of AIDS victims. He is currently taking a traveling exhibit (pictured) across Ethiopia.

In early April I accompanied Eric and others to Babile, a small rural community in the Oromo region.

HIV/AIDS education is relatively new to Babile, despite the fact that a number of people are infected with or have died from AIDS. At the exhibit, one man was outraged and demanded that he meet "HIV" to ask them why they are making children suffer. We had to explain to him that HIV is a disease and not a group of people.

Several individuals assumed that HIV/AIDS can only affect certain ethnicities, and interpreted the fact that the pictures were taken by children in Addis Ababa as proof that HIV/AIDS is an Amharic disease that cannot affect Oromo people.

Hope for Children has been in Babile for only six months. It has one group home and 30 sponsored children - individuals living with remaining parents, friends, or neighbors who receive financial assistance from sponsors both in Ethiopia and abroad. For this trip we organized massage training for home-based caregivers. We hope to conduct life skills and income generating training in the next few months, to help those who have lost their jobs.

During our visit, the founder of Hope for Children, Yewoinshet, and I met with a group of community women to hear about the issues they and their daughters face. In many areas of the country, young girls often become pregnant or are forced to marry while they are still children. In Babile a significant number have been impregnated by soldiers who have eventually abandoned them when they changed locations.

The ones left behind or widowed have few choices other than prostitution, and typically are not reached by programmes aimed at providing prostitutes with access to condoms and HIV/AIDS education.

Another issue the community discussed was Female Genital Mutilation. Even though illegal in Ethiopia, it is estimated that 99% of females in the Eastern Region have experienced FGM. In addition to the trauma of the act itself, little attention is paid to sterilization, exposing young girls to HIV infection.

Following this meeting we were invited to a traditional coffee ceremony hosted by some of our sponsored children. I was amused by the energy and excitement of our hosts, all between the ages of 10 and 14, mimicking the rituals usually performed by adults. It reminded me of my own desire to be mature before my time.

Because I always have my camera, many of my interactions with children turn into impromptu photo sessions. These exercises are a great way for me to connect with the kids without having to rely on my struggling Amharic. During this coffee ceremony the girls I was photographing were very eager to appear a certain way, which was reflected by their choice of clothing (including multiple outfits) and their poses.

At first this puzzled me, but then I remembered my own similar behaviors at their age. I started to see myself in them. So often we only focus on the trauma these children experience, and forget that they are also going through adolescence and the confusion and excitement of that time of life. Having realized that our lives aren’t as different as I thought, I now feel much closer to this community.