Outreach workers share experiences at the CINI annual review. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

“When my husband died of AIDS, my in-laws almost threw me out. A nervous wreck, I didn’t know what to do,” said 22-year-old Amina (name changed), resident of Falta village.

But that was months ago. Now Amina, herself HIV-positive, is an outreach worker with Child In Need Institute (CINI). “I love this, learning here and helping others back in my village. I organise meetings and awareness camps, where I try to help sensitise women like me about HIV and AIDS,” she says.

Amina and a few others like her had come to CINI’s Pailan headquarters on Saturday to share their experiences at an annual review and dissemination workshop for community-based voluntary confidential counselling and testing, initiated for the first time in this part of the country by the NGO.

During check-ups at CINI’s reproductive healthcare unit, a symptomatic occurrence of HIV had been detected among rural women of the area. “Since the launch of the counselling and testing centre, we have detected 15 women with HIV. We now offer nutritional and economic support, apart from counselling to them, and also a few other HIV-positive women referred to us by other agencies,” explains Rumeli Das, assistant director, HIV-AIDS programme, CINI.

The main aim of the centre is to empower these women, so they can lead healthy lives and help others like them in distress, says project associate Soumi Haldar.

Amina will vouch for that. For her, life has taken a whole new turn since she came to Pailan. Married at 13, she’s “never had it better than now”. After the School of Tropical Medicine detected her with HIV, she was referred to CINI’s Pailan centre for training and counselling. Now as a CINI outreach worker, Amina conducts sensitisation programmes and creates platforms for counsellors of CINI to help the rural women in her area.

“Most of these women’s husbands travel outside the state for work or visit brothels, from where they pick up the deadly disease and pass it on to their wives. And for no fault of theirs, girls like Amina suffer,” says Haldar.

Shyamali (name changed), another outreach worker, was infected with HIV during abortion. “My parents-in-law in Budge Budge were against my staying in the same house with them… Now I know I can lead a meaningful life in spite of the disease,” she smiles.