INDIA: Atanasio Flores is a Spanish engineer who invested greater than 15 years of his life within the trade, had an excellent epiphany evoking a spirit of humanism. He ultimately devoted the remainder of his life to bringing life’s golden alternatives to susceptible HIV-positive women in India.
In an interview with Transcontinental Occasions, Atanasio Flores talked about his brainchild, the charitable group of Fundación Cienvidas (actually translated as Basis of 100 lives).
Fundación Cienvidas
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Fundación Cienvidas, curated and supported with the love and diligence of a bunch of individuals, goals to get 100% of the homeless women off the streets, particularly these affected by HIV, and provides them a house, a household, medical help, and an training that will assure e future.
Flores had all the time harbored a dream of constructing a small hospital for kids in India. Throughout his go to as a volunteer at an HIV-dedicated orphanage in Jaipur, Flores realized his path had already been determined for him.
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His imaginative and prescient was of an orphanage the place stigmatized and deserted HIV-positive kids can have a healthful life with their fundamental requirements fulfilled- together with registration, HIV antiretroviral therapy, medical care, training, and a shot at an incredible adoptive household.
Flores found that gender disparity performed an enormous position in impacting alternatives; it was far simpler for boys to take pleasure in sure alternatives which remained closed off for ladies.
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When questioned concerning the express stigmas and dogmas surrounding the illness, which frequently turns the affected into social outcasts and untouchables like lepers, Flores elucidated the subject, citing examples from rural households rooted in superstition and generational trauma.
“There’s an impending stigma in opposition to folks affected/contaminated by HIV due to ignorance, disgrace, and concern that results in the youngsters’s abandonment,” says Flores.
The necessity for inclusion
From his volunteering experiences within the rural components of India steeped in stigmas and superstitions, Flores discovered that the majority of those HIV-positive kids had been born to HIV-positive dad and mom (usually Dalit), whereby the daddy died early, leaving the mom and little one destitute and deserted. Then the kid is taken to an orphanage, and the remainder of the household (uncles, grandparents) no nothing of the ward and are hesitant to maintain her wants.
Even in circumstances when the kid is destructive, her household legacy of optimistic HIV circumstances renders her depressing and wretched, as an object of untouchability and social ostracization.
To deal with the psychological trauma and social stigma of HIV, Flores advises the institution of advocacy packages or formation workshops to signify HIV-positive affected folks as regular, self-reliant, and assured who’ve turned their lives round. In that case, “real-life residing references are one of the simplest ways to deal with this stigma,” he says.
Flores elucidated upon the operations and initiatives that Basis CIENVIDAS works on, which embody constructing orphanages, medical facilities, and colleges for susceptible HIV-positive women in Pandharpur (beginning in 2023) and Jaipur (as and when a sponsor allots land).
Furthermore, the Basis is targeted on bringing in additional sponsors for better monetary sources in constructing colleges and medical centres and offering adaptive services to needy kids.
“We get and handle sponsors from Spain to ship month-to-month the funds to maintain and faculty women in 5 companion orphanages in India: 3 in Jaipur (RA), 1 in Pandharpur (MA), and 1 in Tiruchengode (TN),” Flores revealed. Funds are put aside for numerous important requirements like beds, linens, garments, constructing renovation and upkeep, employees reinforcement, and infrastructural funds wanted for education and medical therapy.
Moreover, the Basis immensely focuses on buying and sending volunteers from Spain to some packages in India as a way to get extra personal help.
As a concluding inspirational message of hope and achievement, we requested Flores to say a number of phrases of encouragement that would spark revolutionary adjustments in turning the standard narrative round HIV and different stigmatized ailments like leprosy.
“These women, by the 1000’s, are proper now on the streets, alone, with starvation, with concern… deserted. They don’t seem in any registry or census. They won’t have entry to any therapy, so they may develop the SIDA and die. They don’t exist…
“Assist us say that they exist. Assist us give them the life they deserve.”
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