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Women Role
In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 60 percent of individuals living with HIV infection are women. This disproportionate burden is due less to a specific biologic susceptibility to infection, and more to their lack of basic human rights. Women and girls are put at risk by economic vulnerability resulting from discrimination and lack of legal protections.
Bishop Kevin Dowling, the South African Bishops' liaison for AIDS believes that "there has been a breakdown of all the value system the Ubuntu system which is central to African culture and family and community life. Nonetheless, I am so humbled and enriched by the quality of women in particular who inside themselves have got an incredible capacity to love and care and to keep going through solidarity with each other and above all a great sense of God in their lives".
One such example is Patricia Sawo, a Kenyan Pastor. I met Patricia last December at a World Aids Day organised by the Church of Scotland and Waverly Care in Glasgow. Pastor Sawo is a founding member of the African Network for Religious leaders living with or personally affected by HIV and AIDS (ANERELA) set up in Toronto in august 2006. The message she brought to Scotland was clear and powerful. She received a blood transfusion during an operation and contracted HIV. "Once I met a man who had lived for 11 years with HIV and said he hated God. I thought if he can live so long hating God, then I - loving God - can live a lot longer then that". In addition to her own five children and the four she adopted, the death of his brother to AIDS and sister in law to malaria means that she ids currently looking after 17 children having taken their family in as well. "I am on any drugs at the moment but I eat well and I pray. I know that is possible for me to live a long and full life, which gives me great hope".