Siphiwe Hlophe is so huge that when I came to give her a hug to say goodbye I couldn’t get my arms round her. “Well, at least you don’t have Aids,” I said. That sounds an appalling thing to say, but in Swaziland Aids is such an overwhelming fact of life – and death – that people who work on Aids projects make jokes about it all the time. Hlophe laughed. “But I am HIV-positive,” she said, as straight as a bullet.
She had just turned 40 in 1999 when she won a scholarship to study agricultural economics at Bradford University. She has four children, the eldest 22 years old and the youngest 11. A condition of the scholarship was that she took an Aids test, which she did, believing there was no reason to be worried. She was stunned to find she was HIV-positive. Her husband left her immediately, she lost her scholarship and she thought she was going to die. With the help of friends, she came through the trauma and decided to do something for people living with Aids. She formed a group called Swapol (Swazis for Positive Living). It now has 150 members, mostly HIV-positive women.
Content from our partners
