How varsities are coping with HIV

I  got cough and typhoid while in Senior Six. The doctor asked me to take an HIV test, which turned out positive. Although he comforted me and told me people with HIV can have a bright future, I lost interest in studies. I had always been a bright student, but my grades went down. 

 

My parents kept wondering what was happening to me. In my third term, I refused to go to school, but they forced me to sit the final exams. 

 

During my Senior Six vacation, I got involved with a man who was known to be HIV-positive. When my parents found out about the relationship, I told them I already had the virus. They were angry. At that time I had come to terms with my status and I was ready to join university.

 

My mother said she could not pay school fees for a ‘dead’ person. After sometime, my father understood the situation and I started university. However, my mother still mistreats me. She does not want me to share anything with my sisters. When I borrow their clothes, she stops them from wearing them again. I use my own basin, cup and plate. 

The stigma also follows me to class because my neighbours who go to the same university know about my status. Each time they see me with a boy, they hurl insults at me. 

 

 

 

AS the HIV virus ravages Ugandans, with the annual prevalence rate at 6.4%, students are silently suffering from the effects of the scourge. 

 

“I was told I am useless and would die when I marked my fifth birthday. No one wanted to share a room with me, they thought I would infect them,” Paul says.  

 

The 20-year-old, who is studying for a diploma in development studies at Gulu University, is one of the longest-living persons born with HIV. Paul watched his mother and three sisters succumb to AIDS. At university, he raged with anger, once striking a colleague with a chair for calling him a “walking corpse”.  Classmates, paranoid about his illness, refused to shake his hand or sit close to him. Afraid of what his friends would call him, he often skipped lectures. 

 

“His grades declined and at one time, he was the last in his class,” says Francis Omona, his uncle and guardian. 

As the world marks World AIDS Day, the impact of the scourge on higher education is worrying.  

 

A 2010 HIV sero-behavioural study in six universities in Uganda reveals that the HIV prevalence rate is estimated at 1.2%, with the highest being in Gulu University at 1.8% and the lowest in Mbarara University at 0.4%. The HIV prevalence rate at Makerere University stood at 1%, Kampala International University (1.3%), Uganda Christian University (1.3%) and Islamic University in Uganda (1.5%).

 

The study found out that some of the risk factors of HIV transmission among university students are sexual intercourse, with over 78% reported to have said they have ever had sex.

 

According to the study, condom use among the students was very low at less than 40%. It noted that condom use increases with age, from less than 18% of the students aged 15 using a condom at first sexual encounter to about 68% between the ages of 20 and 24. However, condom use thereafter declines to less than 52% among students aged 25-29 and declines further to 40% to those aged 30 and above.

 

Also the study showed that 42% of the students have multiple sexual partners and 8% engage in cross-generational sex.

Statistics of this study showed that overall, only 2% of the students had an accepting attitude to people living with HIV, meaning stigma is high.

 

HIV-positive students grapple with emotional, social and psychological problems, thus affecting their studies.

Abonyo, 21, from the Kansanga-based Kampala International University has been ostracised and tormented. 

 

Abonyo did not know she had HIV until the age of 14 when her parents and physician told her. Abonyo said her mother wants her to keep her sero-status a secret. Her little sister, who is HIV-negative, does not know about it. 

“Keeping it inside feels like holding your breath underwater for too long,” Abonyo says. 

 

Yet close friends she confided in betrayed her. Her best friend at the university and her ex-boyfriend “told everyone to keep away from me”.

 

Abonyo’s schoolwork was affected as she constantly feared and “focused on having to deal with this problem”. 

 

Abonyo met other HIV-positive students last year for the first time at a conference organised by the Straight Talk Foundation at Gulu Youth Centre.

 

 “Here I trust everyone,” she says. 

The gathering was also eye-opening for Alice Khissa, 22, from Mbale-based Islamic University in Uganda. 

Khissa got the virus when she was 16. Her classmates mistreated her. She said at one school, nobody wanted to sit next to her or speak or share anything with her. She left for another school. 

 

At the new school, Khissa did not disclose her HIV status, not even to her boyfriends, although she always used condoms.