HOPE,
HEALTH, AND HIV
“I
thank God for the fact that there are people who care about lost and hopeless people like me,” a woman named Katia* says. “I cannot turn life back and change [my circumstances], but what happened in the last two years has taught me to appreciate every single moment of my life.” For the past two years, Katia has been attending a weekly HIV/AIDS support group at the Nazarene church in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. After discovering she was HIV-positive, Katia, 39, did not want to live and believes the only thing that kept her alive were her children. She began going to the support group more than a year ago because she felt she had no other option, yet she thought she would never be able to trust anyone with her story. Soon, though, she realized how the members of the group were like her and could best understand what she was going through. Katia felt she could trust the group, and it gave her optimism that perhaps she could live a meaningful life after all. “Even then I realized that I can tell everything to these people,” Katia says. “I can honestly say they brought me back to normal life.” Throughout most of her life, Katia had not had a loving relationship with anyone, including her parents. But after a failed first marriage, she met a man who truly made her happy and who felt the same way about her. Their joy abruptly ended, though, when her partner told her he was HIV-positive and when she soon discovered she was also carrying the virus. “I do not know the right words to describe my pain and fear at that moment,” Katia says. “[It is] the feeling that you are on your own with the beast that devours your life piece by piece.” Tragically, her partner has since passed away. Katia’s story is not only a common one, but it’s also part of an epidemic happening throughout Ukraine as its HIV infection rates are among the highest in the world.
A YOUTH CRISIS
IN UKRAINE, CHURCH-BASED MINISTRIES SUPPORT CHILDREN AND FAMILIES AFFECTED BY HIV AND AIDS by Andriy Tahktay , NCM CIS, and Jimmie Presley, NCM Communications
22 | NCM Magazine
The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is seeing one of the steepest rises in the spread of HIV and AIDS worldwide, according to UNICEF. The epidemic is fueled predominantly by drug use and unsafe sex practices, particularly among intravenous drug users, sex workers, and migrating populations. The lack of hope and opportunity caused by Ukraine’s faltering economy also contributes to risky behaviors that are speeding the spread of HIV. Increasingly, HIV is gaining a younger