Emily Graves spoke with Cherish Uganda Director, Rachel Parsons

Today, there are 150,000 children living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda and today, over 50% of these children are in desperate need of antiretroviral drugs to live tomorrow.

Cherish Uganda is a faith-based NGO responding to the most vulnerable, orphaned and abandoned children living with the HIV virus. Their response is built on the HOPE principles of Healthcare, Love, Prosperity and Education.

Emily Graves spoke with Director Rachel Parsons about the effect their approach is having and her vision for the future.

Emily: To start off with can you tell me a bit more about Cherish Uganda and what it does?

Rachel: Cherish Uganda has set up a children's village. We like to call it a children's village rather than an orphanage. We call it a children's village because it hosts children who come in from homes where they've been abandoned, or they've been orphaned, or they've found themselves in circumstances where they won't be able to live. They come in and they become sons and daughters in that village. It's a place of wholeness for them; it's a place where they're coming to live.

The children that live with us are HIV positive, which makes them unique to most children living in Uganda in other child care organisations. When they come in they find a family, a home and love. We're able to offer them health care and education; basically a holistic care programme and they grow.

There are amazing doctors, because most children are said to have been dead a long time ago and now they are really grabbing on to life. It's miraculous.

That's what Cherish is at the moment. We have a village of homes, a school, a farm and a health clinic, but we intend to grow to be able to reach many children living with HIV in Uganda.

Emily: What is the perception of children with HIV in the country; are they accepted?

Rachel: I think to answer that question you have to look back into the history books of the last 30 years. In the early eighties, HIV went through Southern Africa as it did much of the world. It turned up on people's doorsteps and it was an unknown quantity. Probably the first thing that happened is people thought it was witchcraft. If you had this disease where you basically waste away and then die, it was said to have been witchcraft and so you were somehow cursed. That was the first stigma that got attached to HIV; but that was very early days.

When research and medicine discovered that it was transmitted through sexual means, then it immediately became associated to immorality and people who weren't, according to the church, living right and so it became stigmatised within the church. It became the sinful disease. The church was quite rejecting of people with HIV.

As medicine came in and as a sensitisation started to happen, it became more of a health crisis in the country rather than an immorality crisis or witchcraft crisis. It's become less and less stigmatised. However because at the time that HIV came on the scene it wiped out so many lives, today it is still very highly associated to death; when you say that you have HIV you're basically saying that I don't have long to live. You talk of your death in the same sentence as when you're talking about HIV.

The realities are different than the stigma. The reality is that there is medicine; there's hope and a future for people living with HIV well into adult life if they are a child and well into their adult life if they're adults already. We know people who've lived 25 years without medication, well into their adult life, before even beginning the treatment that is available. There is definitely hope, but the stigma causes people to say this person has HIV therefore they'll die. If you translate that into the lives of children, for example, the mother and father die and leave their children; a young boy and a young girl have been passed on to another family member for care and they're also living with the disease; the carers immediately relate that child to being death waiting to happen and so they hold back on the care that that child needs.

Emily: Have you found that you have to change the mindsets of the local community?