DISHA Community Awareness Session, a volunteers perspective

Today I was lucky enough to accompany some of the DISHA ladies into the community to conduct an awareness session about HIV in a client’s home. The client, a woman named Maharinda, is HIV+, along with her husband and two children. It was explained to me that she was first diagnosed she was very unhappy, in denial about her condition and unwilling to speak to anybody from DISHA who tried to reach out to her. I found this description difficult to connect to the smiling woman who I met today, who was so enthusiastic about the work that DISHA do that she had invited her female friends and neighbours into her home to participate in the awareness session. We all squeezed into Maharinda’s house, some of us sat on the bed and some on the floor, and listened intently as the DISHA ladies explained the causes of HIV and how you can protect yourself from the disease. It was easy to see how interested everybody was; their attention remained focused on the speakers until the end.

For me, the afternoon highlighted what makes DISHA so effective. They are proactive about awareness, not inviting people to come to them but going out into the community, into people’s homes, to spread their message. As members of the community themselves, the DISHA staff are in a perfect position to build relationships of trust – something that was evident today when they were invited into somebody’s home to talk about what is still a very taboo subject.

Kate Evans, volunteer, Deep Griha Society