Editor’s Pick: Gloria, Living Openly with AIDS in Nata, Botswana.

Gloria doesn’t hide her condition…she has AIDS. She discovered she is infected shortly after watching her mother died of the disease.

Gloria is a single-parent mother who earns paltry wages as an office cleaner in Nata, a Botswanian village of 5000 inhabitants. Botswana has the second highest HIV infection rate in Africa. The current rate of infection is 37% nationally (about one in every three people infected); HIV rate in Nata is even higher. The pandemic has left Nata with over 400 orphans. Currently, nearly 50% of all pregnant women in Nata are HIV positive.

Meet Gloria - excerpt of her story:

“I’m no longer frightened about the pills and I just think of them as food. I have a friend who stopped taking her ARV’s after she became better and now she is dying. Stopping the ARV’s is like the water drying in the river. I will never stop taking my pills. My CD4 count is now over 600 and I’m not having any side effects from the ARV’s. I have a 4 year old daughter who is negative. But it was when she was 1 year old that I tested positive and her father ran from me and our house. I’ve tried to encourage him to test but he has run. He thinks he can run from this AIDS.”

Read more: The Nata Village Blog