“I will use them when I get a lady…I think it would be a big loss if I also get infected with HIV/AIDS after my father,” he said.
This 21 year old young man who is still living with his parents in Nyamweru cell in a poor suburb of Kigali City has made protecting himself a priority since his father was tested HIV positive last year. Nsengiyumva is among several Rwandans struggling to remain safe from HIV/AIDS after statistics said that at least 3 per cent of the country’s population live with the disease, including his father.
Since last year, the young man doesn’t miss out in campaigns and conferences against HIV AIDS in his area and he carefully listens to what his father Constantin Murenzi and his mother Venantie Mukanyonga give him as advice against the disease.
“I avoid all of those things that can bring about the HIV virus,” he said.
Nsengiyumva went for an HIV test and found out that he is HIV negative. Though he first believes in abstinence and says that he doesn’t think condom assures him 100 per cent protection, he used condoms when he had sex three months ago. So, he practices both abstinence and the use of condom to protect him-self against the AIDS pandemic.
But the whole family started discussing a lot about preventive measures after the head of the family found him-self HIV positive after he had slept with a widow nearby their home. Now, in order to protect both his nine children and his wife who was unexpectedly tested HIV negative, Murenzi has demystified talking about sex to his family and he cautions them at almost every time he can.
“AIDS doesn’t choose a married one or an unmarried one so I told them that all are candidates to HIV/AIDS,” he said. “I told them that I contracted the virus and I don’t want them to die the way I am about to die.”
In a meeting that he convened with his family at his home by inviting all of his children, both unmarried and the married ones, the 86 year-old man ordered all of his descendants to go for blood test in order to know their situation. All of them respected his order and they all fortunately found them-selves HIV negative and, according to their father, they all decided to make the fight against the virus a priority.
“Let’s begin a war against HIV/AIDS and we have to win it” Murenzi recalled telling these words to his children.
Mukanyonga, the children’s mother, said that she agreed to have sex with her sick husband by using a condom after listening to several pieces of advice from nurses, local health workers and campaigners against HIV/AIDS. Otherwise, the whole family fell into total shock when the father was first diagnosed the virus, she says. She helps her husband to urge their children to take measures against the disease and she somewhere considers that her and the husband were late to talk about sex and reproductive health in their family.
“It was a big sign that made us start telling the children about AIDS when their father got infected,” she said.
As she explained the way talking about sex in their family used to be a taboo, just like in those of many Rwandans, Mukanyonga said that their son Nsengiyumva still needs to know a lot about sex, even at the age of 21.
“We have to stay near him and remind him every time what he has to do,” she said.
As for Nsengiyumva, he says that it is a good thing that parents encouraged him to have a voluntary HIV/AIDS testing and taught him about sexuality as there are many families where talking about sex remains a taboo.
“It [sex education] helps me when I am in doubt because in our age we face many temptations,” he said, adding that before he used to feel ashamed about holding discussions about sex with his parents.
If there is any great thing that his mother wishes him and all of her children is to be faithful with his future sexual partner when he gets married one day.
“They don’t have to cheat their wives or their husbands,” said a 49 year-old woman who keeps reminding her husband to bring condoms whenever he rushes to the hospital for his antiretroviral drugs (ARVs).
As Nsengiyumva held the two white condoms in his hands and kept his eyes on them in lots of smiles, hope made itself obvious that, maybe one day, a dream of breaking the transmission chain of HIV/AIDS will turn into a reality in Rwanda, Africa, and the World over.