Interview Transcript
JP
JP Heath from Church of Sweden and this afternoon I’m sitting with Peter Borges from India. You’re an INERELA+ ambassador and you’ve been engaged with HIV work over an extended period of time. But more recently you’ve been working on HIV in youth and adolescents, can you share some of that work with us?
Peter
Yes, the reason why I focused exclusively my work on HIV and adolescent is because what I realised that it’s the first time in the history of the epidemic that we are seeing survivor children born with HIV.
Surviving up till adolescent and so far we don’t have evidence based programmes which has been successful and which we can adapt with regard to adolescent living with HIV, especially when it comes to mental health. So that’s been one of the biggest area identified by us and we are trying to work on various strategies. And what can be adapted or what best practises we can learn from other countries and other programmes and we can adapt time in India.
So we have the programme is based in Goa with extension in neighbouring districts of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Now the whole programme aims to build resilience among adolescent living with HIV so psychosocial support is one of our main component where we try to address the whole gap of mental health second big aspect is social protection. We believe that that can help to build resilience and also address the various issues surrounding the condition in which adolescents are living. The third big, very important issue for us is treatment or the antiretrovirals.
So we try and use various strategies like treatment buddies and wearing two peers connect to each other. They remind them about taking treatment and things like that. So apart from that we also believe that we there is a need to get them together.
Because they we work in a community based setting, not an institutional setting. So there is need for them to get together so that over a period of five days, six days where we engage them in a residential camp and we try speaking about various issues which matters to them.
JP
This is an area that is so infrequently talked about and when we talk about the focus that we should have on HIV. Mostly the work that we are doing with youth and adolescence, particularly those living with HIV, doesn’t enjoy this same focus. If you have to give us one challenge, what is it?
Peter
One of the biggest challenge I face because there is countrywide as well as statewide. There is no data disaggregated so that we we know that this many adolescents are living with HIV in toward the country. Even the medical part treatment tracks adolescent from 15 to 49 age group, so that is not the way we could get a fair picture of how our programme should be designed and implemented.
JP
We living in a world where HIV has been seen as an aging issue and yet we live in a world where youth and adolescents born with HIV are now surviving and surviving into adulthood. There are complex issues that we haven’t even begun to think of mental health and social support ss one of them. We need to design programmes that address these issues.
