Gifting with HIV

Coleen* is a 24-year-old high school dropout who discovered she was HIV-positive when she fell pregnant in 2006. Her child suffered asphyxia and died at 10-weeks old; it was a baby girl. Coleen was devastated; she had been craving a child of her since her sister gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.

I believe that the loss of a child could lead a mother to be irrational in her grief. It is because this belief that I can perhaps excuse and even forgive how Coleen went out to find the next man she could trick into impregnating her.

You see, upon the death of their child, her boyfriend had promptly dumped her and taken a wife. This new wife was everything Colleen wasn’t, she was a big African woman with curves in all the right places, in the little village they all lived in, being fat meant you clearly did not have AIDS and could bear him many sons. Coleen’s figure could (and still can) put a runway models to shame although she was slightly short for that career path.

Coleen did find a man to impregnate her, but she never told him that she was HIV-positive and in 2008 she was spotting a new bump and very much in love with the new man. This did not stop her having very public and embarrassing slanging matches with the wife of her ex lover. When this woman failed to conceive the sons her husband had anticipated he kicked her to the curb which only served to make Coleen even more unpleasant and spiteful.

Maybe she hoped that her ex lover would take her back and marry her since she had demonstrated that she could have children. But the man took another woman, a bigger version of his first. At the age of 23, this young man has had two wives.

I say I could forgive Coleen going and purposefully infecting another person, perhaps one who didn’t already have HIV because she was riddled with grief and is not the smartest person I know. She didn’t drop out of school because she was lazy after all; she dropped out because she just could not get past the 10th Grade.

A woman who loses a child would do anything to have her back. She is wounded more deeply than any other wound known to mankind. Hands used to cuddling the squirming warmth of her child, gurgling nonsensically while the purest form of love cascades through her like a live fire, are suddenly barren. Left clutching only the reminders; the fluffy toy, the rattle and the clothes she will never outgrow. Bereft. For Coleen, the hole could only be filled with another child, HIV be damned.

And so she gave birth to another adorable baby girl; she heeded the rules the hospital had set out – only breastfeed or only bottle feed for the first six month if you want your child to stand a chance against infection. She breastfed her baby who grew cuter by the day and when this child’s father did a bunk Coleen did not despair, she had what she wanted, an adorable baby of her very own. Even Coleen’s worst critics, for in a village everyone knows everyone else’s business, started to mellow and overlook that she had infected someone with HIV.

But with the birth of a normal baby girl also came Coleen’s healing. She now could live fully again; and this meant date of course. Her first victim, cleverly seduced, was her ex lover, just to make sure he was indeed infected with HIV she began to sleep with him again; inviting him to her bed, often with the baby sleeping soundly next to them. At the local communal water tap she was heard to boast, “I have taught his wife a lesson she’ll never forget,’ to awed audiences who went home to further discuss this and hope she got her comeuppance. But otherwise do nothing.

She then began yet another relationship with three other men (if her wagging tongue at funeral vigils while villagers await the priest and need a good story to chase away the chill is to be believed) and finally one man won her heart. And her HIV. And the title of her third child

I do not judge Coleen, I believe that the men she may or may not have infected also had a responsibility to protect themselves. They did not know this woman and displayed the same ignorance and carelessness that has allowed HIV/AIDS to ravage our continent unabated. But she knew and she did nothing. For her own selfish reasons she continued to have unprotected sex and produce children, who in all probability will end up either dead or orphans. That is saddening.

And more frightening is that Coleen is not the only one who does this.

*not her real name.