India: The Orphans of HIV
Posted on April 26, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, India, International, women.
MUMBAI, India — Three teenage girls pull up chairs and form a semi-circle around me. Sabeena, whose pigtails and wide eyes make her look younger than her 15 years, carries a bowl of grapes and offers them to me. No, no, I tell her, I’m fine. “Take one,” she insists. I oblige.
Her friend, Amrita, also 15, tells me she is in her last year of high school. How long have you lived at this orphanage, I ask.
She smiles and puts her hand over her mouth. “One second, no?” she says and runs into the kitchen to ask the correct English word from Sister Shanti Remedios, the sister-in-charge of the HIV section at St. Catherine’s Home in Mumbai.
Amrita runs back and jumps onto her seat: “13 years.”
I try to ask the girls about life in the orphanage and living with HIV. I ask where they will go once they turn 18 or 19 and must move out. They do not want to discuss it.
“Which Hindi movie is your favorite?” Sabeena asks me.
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