Kolkata: HIV Activist Applauds Church's New AIDS Center

[Guest guest]

HIV Activist Applauds Church's New AIDS Center

December 12, 2008

DUMDUM, India (UCAN) -- A Hindu activist has commended the Church for

opening a center near Kolkata to counsel and treat people with HIV

and AIDS.

The AIDS Care Centre " will help immensely " people affected by HIV or

AIDS, Somir Biswas, a person living with HIV, told Catholic priests,

nuns and laypeople who attended the opening function at Dumdum, some

20 kilometers north of the eastern metropolis.

Calcutta archdiocese's social-service office opened the center on

World AIDS Day, Dec. 1, in collaboration with the health commission

of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India. Calcutta is the old

name for Kolkata, capital of West Bengal state, 1,460 kilometers

southeast of New Delhi.

The CBCI health commission has opened similar centers in various

parts of India to diagnose and counsel people with HIV or AIDS. The

Dumdum center is the fourth in West Bengal.

Biswas, who was diagnosed with HIV 15 years ago, expressed happiness

that the Church has started centers to care for people like him. He

said his family and friends shunned him after his diagnosis and for

five years he lived with beggars on a railway platform in the city.

After much search, he found an AIDS-counseling center in Kolkata 12

years ago where he met two people who identified themselves as HIV-

positive. " Talking to them gave me some hope, but they were unwilling

to reveal their identity, " said Biswas, the first person in Kolkata

to openly admit his HIV-positive status a decade ago.

Now 38, he credited Suresh Kumar, who directs the state government-

managed Calcutta Health Centre, for encouraging him to work for

people living with HIV and AIDS. Other NGOs supported him after media

published his interview.

Gradually Biswas met more HIV-positive people and they began to meet

on Thursdays in Kolkata to share about their lives and plan for the

future. They gradually started nine centers with government support

to counsel such people and their families. They also started Calcutta

Network of HIV Positive People.

Biswas said his family accepted him back four years ago. Now he lives

with his parents, brother, sister-in-law and nephew in the family's

house in Machalandapur, a village 60 kilometers north of Kolkata.

" We do not need your compassion but want you to recognize our

rights, " said the activist, who heads the HIV-positive network in the

state's North 24 Parganas district.

Father Soosai Manickam, who has worked in the Dumdum area for more

than three decades, described the new AIDS center as " a needed

ministry. " The Church has to take the initiative to care for people

living with HIV or AIDS and their families, he said.

http://www.ucanews.com/2008/12/12/hiv-activist-applauds-churchs-new-

aids-center/