THE happy ending is a “living happily ever after” story which one headmistress wished for when her husband loved her despite her HIV positive status.
Sadly that was a short-lived dream come true for her as he gave in to outside influence.
“I loved him and disclosed my status. He understood but after a while he started to stigmatise me before he left for good,” said Grace Chabuka, a headmistress in Masvingo narrating her ordeal to journalists at an HIV/AIDS workshop.
When love turned to stigmatisation and abuse the husband (name supplied) accused her of trying to kill him.
Her emotional story took reporters back into time.
“In 2007 I met an attractive handsome man who proposed marriage. I disclosed that I was on ARVs but he did not believe it so we both went for HIV testing and counselling. I tested positive and he tested negative. Upon retesting three months later after staying together he volunteered to get circumcised,” she said.
After that, good times rolled out in 2010 as they had a colourful wedding that was attended by a number of people.
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| Stigmatised HIV+ wife speaks out |
It was a happy discordant couple. A discordant couple is a couple that involves a negative and a positive partner.
She said her CD 4 count rose to 912. She later got pregnant.
She started the prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals.
“My viral load was undetected and I had no sexually transmitted infections. I was given a combination of ARV drugs during pregnancy. I delivered a healthy HIV negative girl through caesarean section,” she said.
But after six months her marriage life became a nasty affair.
“My husband started to discriminate me accusing me of being on a mission to infect him with HIV. He would constantly shout at me about my HIV positive status,” she said.
“He became violent as such he beat me and behaved funny towards me. Due to that our marriage became a sorrowful affair as he stopped eating the food that I had prepared for him. At the end he left me with our six-months-old child. I was very hurt as I loved him so dearly. I had bouts of despair and melancholic feelings because I missed my husband,” she said.
The tough time she suddenly found herself in affected her performance at work.
Some people in her community blamed her for disclosing her status.
“They asked me why I disclosed my status to the people and some resultantly disclosed that they were HIV positive to me but said I should not reveal to anyone. But most of my colleagues understood me and comforted me. Students don’t know about my status save for those who have heard from the people or have seen me speaking about HIV issues on different media platforms,” she said.
In a bid to help other people who are stigmatised she enrolled for a course on counselling and she is now a qualified facilitator.
At the same occasion monitoring and evaluation director Amon Mpofu said he had noted with concern that during the campaign Towards Ending Aids there were some people who still associated HIV positive people with certain behaviour as a result they stigmatised them.
