On Saturday we started a whole new trip for the pastors. After an early morning and a crowded train ride we arrived at Dharmapuri where we had scheduled three days of medical clinic. Dharmapuri is an interesting town. 
It lies right along a major North-South trucking route for Southern India, which accounts for the unusually high incidence of HIV in the area. Many of the men will work as truckers and be away from their families for 4-6 weeks at a time. During that time, they will visit prostitutes or mistresses and contract HIV. When they return to their families, they will spread it to their wives who will pass it on the their children. Consequently, the villages around Dharmapuri have extremely high rates of HIV infection.
In addition to that, there is not very much knowledge in the villages about the causes and transmission of HIV. A very common scenario is for a husband to contract HIV, pass it on to his wife and then die. The wife is then often blamed for the death and rejected from her family and the community. On Saturday the medical clinic was especially geared toward HIV positive patients. During that clinic, I counseled several women who were HIV positive, had lost their husbands fairly recently, and had HIV positive children. These were the most heartbreaking cases. Not only were they faced with a terrible disease, but in most cases, their families had rejected them.
On
Saturday I also counseled two women who were the victims of polygamy. One had married a man before finding out that she was the fourth wife. She refused to live with him because of that and so she lived alone with very little hope of her situation improving. Another, Mangoma, was left by her husband when he married a second wife. She was alone with her adopted daughter and lived with her parents. I was excited to hear that she believed in Jesus and wanted to be baptized. But on the day of her baptism, her parents told her that if she were baptized, they would kick her out of their family. So she is stuck, not knowing what to do. Without her family to care for her, she would be completely alone.
It lies right along a major North-South trucking route for Southern India, which accounts for the unusually high incidence of HIV in the area. Many of the men will work as truckers and be away from their families for 4-6 weeks at a time. During that time, they will visit prostitutes or mistresses and contract HIV. When they return to their families, they will spread it to their wives who will pass it on the their children. Consequently, the villages around Dharmapuri have extremely high rates of HIV infection.In addition to that, there is not very much knowledge in the villages about the causes and transmission of HIV. A very common scenario is for a husband to contract HIV, pass it on to his wife and then die. The wife is then often blamed for the death and rejected from her family and the community. On Saturday the medical clinic was especially geared toward HIV positive patients. During that clinic, I counseled several women who were HIV positive, had lost their husbands fairly recently, and had HIV positive children. These were the most heartbreaking cases. Not only were they faced with a terrible disease, but in most cases, their families had rejected them.
On
Saturday I also counseled two women who were the victims of polygamy. One had married a man before finding out that she was the fourth wife. She refused to live with him because of that and so she lived alone with very little hope of her situation improving. Another, Mangoma, was left by her husband when he married a second wife. She was alone with her adopted daughter and lived with her parents. I was excited to hear that she believed in Jesus and wanted to be baptized. But on the day of her baptism, her parents told her that if she were baptized, they would kick her out of their family. So she is stuck, not knowing what to do. Without her family to care for her, she would be completely alone.
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