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Grassroots AIDS activists get their due
Beth Duff-Brown, Associated Press (AP)
August 17, 2006

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14396513/

TORONTO - Behind the glamor and glare of the spotlight on the big names attending the International AIDS Conference, there are thousands of little-known stars who are out in the trenches everyday, fighting the battle against AIDS.

Though they do not have the media draw of Bill and Melinda Gates, former President Bill Clinton or Hollywood's Richard Gere and Bollywood's Sharmila Tagore they are heroes back home, helping the nearly 40 million people worldwide who are living with HIV or AIDS.

There's Betty Makoni, sexually assaulted at 6, orphaned at 9, but determined enough to establish a network of community centers for girls in rural Zimbabwe. There is the nameless young man who stood before China's deputy health minister earlier this week, requesting more funding for HIV care from a government that only recently conceded to having an AIDS problem.

And there is 21-year-old Kerrel McKay, a Jamaican who was 9 when her father was diagnosed with HIV. She watched him slowly die as relatives and neighbors turned away and money for medical care dried up. Today she runs AIDS prevention outreach programs for Jamaica's health ministry, working with children who, like herself, lost one or both parents.

They are among the more than 25,000 delegates attending the 16th International AIDS Conference. Their stories, some say, are overshadowed by mega-stars Gates, Clinton and Gere.

"Is this a Hollywood conference or is this an AIDS conference?" Nkhensani Mavasa, co-chair of the Treatment Action Campaign of South Africa, demanded of organizers, who responded: Those super stars raise billions for the cause, fund invaluable medical research and use their contacts and charisma to prompt governments into action.

Some working in the trenches say they do not mind their backstage status.

"We need to complement each other in this fight," said Makoni, whose efforts to help girls in Zimbabwe have made her a star back home. "Let's get face-to-face. I always worry about the 19th floor in any building. They're up there so high," she joked, referring to the jet-setters in the battle against AIDS. "They need to come down and visit us here on the ground."

Makoni and four other grass-roots activists were honored Wednesday night with inaugural Red Ribbon Awards by the United Nations Development Program and UNAIDS. The awards - to become a regular feature at the biannual International AIDS Conferences - recognize and financially support little-known actors in the historic AIDS drama.

Jurors included Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway and actress Naomi Watts, a UNAIDS special representative. Other winners - who each received $20,000 (euro15,529) - involved activists from the Ukraine, Bangladesh, Thailand, as well as 24-year-old Jonsen Habachimba, who makes school uniforms for AIDS orphans with a lone sewing machine. Another 20 nominees were awarded $5,000 (euro 3,882).

Makoni was orphaned at 11 and then reared by Roman Catholic nuns in the northeastern city of Chitungwiza, enabling her to finish school, go to college and become an English teacher.

"But nothing had changed. Girls kept on crying and I could see a reflection of myself in them; they were abused and abandoned and now it coincided with HIV and AIDS," said Makoni, 35, the mother of six. "My class had 50 girls and by the end of the year, 15. I got really worried; in the back of my mind I knew something similar had happened to them."

So she tracked down the girls and in 1998 started a community center where those who had survived could come to hide and get counseling to help them stay in school.

Today the Girl Child Network has helped 30,000 girls in 500 centers across Zimbabwe, where an estimated 25 percent of the population aged 15 to 49 are believed to be HIV-positive.

Makoni said, some 2,000 of the girls she's treated have succumbed to AIDS, due to stigma, lack of health care and what she call the patriarchal society where men rule.

"The older woman cannot reverse this mindset," she said. "But the younger girls, it's a new generation, so we need to empower them."

Makoni started her project with seed money from the aid organization Oxfam International.

Mark Fried, a spokesman for the aid group, noted that some 50,000 more people had died of AIDS-related illnesses during the six-day conference.

"The front-line in the battle against the epidemic is being waged on a shoestring by small community groups who are often under the radar at a large conference like this," he said. "But they're providing the innovation and the real people power."

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