Poor and HIV-positive in the Dominican Republic

Marisol ( left) visits a family living in a batey(community of sugar cane plantation workers) in the Dominican Republic.She is an HIV/AIDS educator from the women’s organization MUDHA working with Dominicans of Haitian descent.January 2006.

“I don’t have the money or the strength to go to the capital where I might get help,” says Rita who is HIV-positive and seriously ill. “When the fever, the headache and the diarrhoea hit me, I get scared and I think I am going to die.”

For fear of rejection, Rita hasn’t told her family that she is HIV-positive, and the doctor has nothing to offer her but vitamin pills.

The countryside is green and fertile all the way to Rita’s batey – community of workers on the sugar cane plantations – where AI delegates met her in January. But two hours’ drive from the capital, Santo Domingo, the batey lacks clean water, work and often hope for the future.

Rita’s story illustrates the Dominican Republic’s failure to fulfil its human rights obligation to ensure access to health care and treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS.

The international community spends millions of dollars on supporting the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in the Dominican Republic, yet the authorities often fail in their efforts to organize help. It does not reach the people who need it the most.

Next to a busy road on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, Felicia shows AI delegates the office of REDOVIH, a support group for people living with HIV. She is one of the few who has dared to speak openly about her HIV status.

Felicia was working in the public transport company in Santo Domingo when the company made all their workers take a blood test. She was not told what it was for. Before she understood what was going on, her boss and colleagues knew that she was HIV-positive. She lost her job.

“I didn’t realize that they had forced me to take an HIV test. And it was a shock to learn that I  was  positive. Being fired was of course another shock,” Felicia says. But she chose to fight back. “I… tried to file a suit against the company. The company fired 20 people after this test.”

Six women visiting the support group that day all told the same story: compulsory HIV tests at work and before getting a job; no confidentiality about the tests and the results; if the test is positive you are fired.

HIV-positive people from other towns reportedly had similar experiences, suggesting that discrimination in the labour market is common.

Rita is HIV-positive, but unable to get the medicines she desperately needs

In the resort town of Boca Chica, wealthy tourists enjoy a relaxing holiday while just a few minutes away, Marlene, aged 25 and a mother of eight, lies sick in the hospital. She has lived and worked in Boca Chica all her life. AI visited her abandoned  home: a shack with a leaking tin roof and a ragged mattress. She had been found half dead from starvation and illness. She was taken to hospital, dehydrated and unable to care for her  three-year-old child who was left naked, sick and alone. The hospital confirmed that she was HIV-positive and sick, but gave her no treatment. Nobody took care of her child.

She was spotted by Adonis, a volunteer working with HIV/AIDS patients at the hospital in Boca Chica. “At the public hospitals in this country there is widespread  discrimination against people living with HIV. The doctors often refuse to treat us because they are scared,” he says.

The Medical Association confirms that many doctors refuse to treat HIV-positive patients. Without access to sterile gloves, running water and routines for dealing with accidents, they run a high risk of being infected when treating HIV-positive people. In the private medical sector this is not a problem.

Adonis brought Marlene’s child home to his wife and two children who live in a slum area outside Boca Chica. To save Marlene’s life, Adonis, who is also HIV-positive, is working to raise her case with people who can help.

Adonis involves the media in his work and participates in debates on HIV/AIDS. But many people dislike his plainspoken and openly critical focus on AIDS right in the middle of the tourist resort of Boca Chica. “I receive frequent death threats over the phone,” he says, “and I have been followed by unregistered cars at night.”

AI is campaigning to protect activists like Adonis so that they can keep working to protect the rights and dignity of people living with HIV/AIDS, and to ensure that all who need it have access to the health care and medicines they require.