My name is Godian. I was born in Tanzania’s Kagera district in 1954. I am married with four children and I work as a technician for the Tanzanian government in Bariadi. I have been living with HIV for more than seven years.

I first found out about my HIV status in 2004, a time when very little was known about the virus in the rural community where I lived. After initially falling ill, I visited my local hospital for help but they could not provide a diagnosis. Unable to determine the illness that was causing my symptoms, I left the hospital.

My name is Joharia. I am 28 years old, and I was born in Ngara district, Kagera region, Tanzania. In 2005, I fell in love with a man. Together, we conceived, and I gave birth to a baby boy I named Mecki. He was a married man, but he didn’t disclose his marital status to me.

When Mecki was seven months old, my aunt who lives in Arusha region asked my parents if I could live with her. My parents agreed, and in August 2006, I moved to Arusha together with my son.

Junior is a chubby, happy, and playful 11-month-old baby. He is the pride and joy of his parents Wenceslaus and Gloria of Ishongororo, a sub-county of Ibanda district, Uganda. And he is free of HIV.

During a regular antenatal visit when she was six months pregnant with Junior, Gloria discovered that she was HIV-positive. She and her husband Wenceslaus, who had discovered he was HIV-positive shortly before Gloria did, also had their three-year-old son tested.

My name is Martha. Today, I live in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but my story begins in Kitwe, Zambia, where I was born and raised.

Growing up in Zambia, I was surrounded by the effects of AIDS. By the time I was an adult, nearly 700,000 people had already died from AIDS since the first diagnosis in 1984. But to me, those numbers were not just statistics. I watched hopelessly as AIDS destroyed my family, my community, and my country.

It was on a train ride back to the Bronx when I said to my husband Ramon, “Let’s have a baby.”

“Wow! A baby?” Ramon responded with wide eyes.

That reaction may be typical for any possible parent-to-be, but for us, it was even more pronounced. My name is Luz, and I am HIV-positive.

My name is Lindiwe and I am 34 years old. I have been a nurse for 12 years. I started my career in 1998 as a general nurse but graduated with a diploma in midwifery two years later. I have been providing prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services since 2005. I have also been trained in child nutrition and HIV care and treatment.

My name is Esther. I am 17 years old and living with HIV. I come from a big family of 20 children, each of us from a different mother. My father had many wives and children, but we were not close; in fact, I only know two of my siblings. After my mother passed away when I was only three months old, I was taken to live with one of my stepmothers. 

My name is Teopista and I am 13 years old. I come from a family of five children from two mothers. After my mother died when I was very young, my father remarried. My stepmother was very nice to all of us, but she also died. I was eight years old at the time, so my father took me to the village to live with my Jjajas (grandparents). After about three months, my siblings and I were told that our father had AIDS and was very sick. Before that, I didn’t know what AIDS was. 

My name is Josephine, I am 18 years old, and I live in Mukono District, Uganda. I was born with HIV, but I didn’t know my status until about five years ago. You see, I never met my mother; I was told that she died when I was very young. I spent my early childhood living with my father, stepmother, three stepsisters, and a stepbrother.

When I was four years old, my grandmother (who I called Jjaja) took me to live with her, claiming that I was being mistreated by my stepmother. I was too young to understand anything. While living with Jjaja, I fell sick for long periods of time. Hospital treatments didn’t seem to work, and I missed a lot of nursery school.