« Food Crisis Pushes 122 Million into Hunger
More on the New E.U. Ag. Pledge »

PEPFAR stories from-the-ground: in Vietnam

July 9th, 2008 at 12:58 pm | posted by Virginia Simmons

Hanh is a HIV-positive widow in Vietnam who was featured in “A Powerful Noise,” which was produced by Unify Films with participation from CARE and ONE.

Hanh

Hello! My name is Hanh and I am from Vietnam.

I grew up in an isolated island in the northeast of Vietnam. When I was 18 I got married and moved with my husband to a place about three hours by boat from my homeland. We lived there for three years before I decided finally to take my daughter to a Vietnamese hospital after she had been sick for a long time. That was when I found out she was HIV positive. Then, I found out that my husband was too. They told me I didn’t even have to take a test. All of us were infected.

My daughter was three-and-a-half-years old. Eventually, they both passed away.

I returned to my home, and decided I needed to take action within my community. We had many HIV/AIDS related activities sponsored by outside organizations and programs like PEPFAR.

Ninety percent of AIDS patients in my community are taking ARV’s provided by PEPFAR and one hundred percent of us have been benefitting from other PEPFAR programs. We have access to medicine as well as treatment and care for children. But it’s not always about medical care. We also benefit from training courses and community building activities.

There are still many more problems that arise in my community. We need to increase access to medical treatment, and more people are always becoming infected. We also need to address problems like women’s awareness of HIV/AIDS, sexual education and care for children.

I hope that more and more people will benefit from programs like PEPFAR. Of course, being a beneficiary of the program myself I understand how important it is.

I want to say personally and on behalf of all people living with HIV in Vietnam that we are very grateful for programs like PEPFAR. Thank you for going forward hand in hand with us on this. We need your support.
I ask that you please keep going on the road that you chose.

-Bui My Hanh

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Vietnam, PEPFAR2008, HIV/AIDS, PEPFAR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “PEPFAR stories from-the-ground: in Vietnam”

  1. Debbie K Says:
    July 9th, 2008 at 8:30 pm

    Thanks Virginia for the info on this powerful movie and especially for Hanh’s story here in the ONE Blog.

    I think that it’s very important for supporters of PEPFAR to always mention the critical role that PEPFAR is playing in Vietnam and in several countries in the Caribbean along side of Africa in combatting the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS around the world.

    I hope that “A Powerful Noise” will have a larger distribution soon. I would love to see it.

    ALWAYS FOREVER, ONE - debbie :)
    www.mpwn-uganda.org
  2. V. H. Hammontree Says:
    July 10th, 2008 at 8:14 am

    I can think of no more powerful voice than this to let people in the U.S. know what we are doing and why. All of our vigilance is necessary but a voice from the front lines is always compelling.

    Peace

    V. H.

Leave a Reply