May 12th: an event also for her!

The Community of Sant'Egidio wishes a future free from AIDS to all mothers in Africa; for them and for their children.

Best wishes to all the mothers who today are celebrating, best wishes also to their children born free of AIDS thanks to the therapy which saved their lives.

In a beautiful nursery rhyme Gianni Rodari wrote, "I was made by my mom – and I’m very happy!" Sometimes though, the poet continued, "these reports are baseless!"

It happens too often that so many children cannot say the same. These are the children destined to a short life because they were born from HIV positive mothers who cannot take advantage of the vertical prevention, the treatment that allows all children to be born healthy. It allows all children of the world to say, “I was made by my Mom – and I’m very happy!” 

It is now more than ten years that DREAM, the program against AIDS and malnutrition, allows healthy children to be born from HIV positive mothers in ten African countries. By now we have reached more than 20,000 children born healthy. Children who laugh, who go to school, who live! They are the future of the continent, the future of the world! They are the living proof to “uninformed people” who thought that they could not survive. Instead, with the help of many mothers, they can say to the world “I was made by my Mom  – and I’m very happy!”

Best wishes then to all African women who, with courage and determination work to allow other mothers and other children to be saved and to hope again. For all of them, our commitment to eliminate the transmission of the HIV virus from mother to child, so that future generations will be free from AIDS and so that the Millennium Goal to reduce maternal mortality by 75% within 2015 may be reached.

Best wishes to Mom Cacilda who became a testimonial of how treatment restores the future and the hope to so many moms who believed to be destined to a death sentence for themselves and for their children.

Watch the video and see also her interview here.

Best wishes to all the mothers of more than 20,000 children born healthy thanks to the DREAM program in Africa: Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Cameroon, Congo DRC, Angola and Nigeria.

Best wishes to Pacem Kawonga, who in her book "a future for my children”, with feeling and passion tells about her story as a HIV-positive mother and, her struggle to restore hope and courage to her own life, that of her daughter, and that of many African women.

A passion that took her up to the UN building to demand universal access to treatment beyond all distinctions of race, gender, religion, age and socioeconomic status.

Universal. To allow all mothers to celebrate.

Best Wishes!

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