Stigma remains greatest hurdle in Kenya's fight against AIDS

0 Comments | AFP, December, 2006

NAIROBI (AFP) — Three-year-old Ibraham Akinyi pushes a toy car made of scrap metal across a makeshift wooden table, oblivious to the horrors that befell his mother, Beatrice, after his father's death from AIDS in 2003. "Two days after my husband's funeral, a group of his relatives, including his father, came to my house and forced their way inside, pretending to be drunk," the HIV-positive mother-of-two recalls as she sits in her one-room, mud-walled home in Kibera, sub-Saharan Africa's largest slum.

"They told me, 'Get out and go, take the kids.' They said not to pack anything, it all belonged to them and then tore the whole house down because they blamed me for his death," said Akinyi, 29, who suspects her philandering husband became infected by one of his many...