I came to the UK in 1996. Before then, in Argentina, I had partners who I knew had been injecting drugs yet I never thought I could be HIV positive. But after coming to the UK my health began to deteriorate so I went for a test. When it was positive, it wasn’t that much of a shock - probably of my friends, some 20% are infected, so it wasn’t completely new to me.

I decided to try to do something to help people in developing countries that were not so lucky. So I started translating into Spanish materials I found very useful myself - about safe sex, talking about sex with your partners, living positively with HIV. It was the sort of information I thought women would never see in Latin America. I helped produce a booklet in Spanish on thinking positively about what you can do with your life after the diagnosis. That’s how I went from being a woman with a positive diagnosis to an advocate for women’s rights.

I haven’t had to face many of the things that friends in developing countries are still facing - the stigma, the isolation. They are not even able to talk with their partners about their status. There are things around disclosure that women can’t face yet and many can’t talk about their sex lives. I found a lot of positive women in Latin America who decided not to have safe sex because they didn't know how to ask a partner to use a condom if they didn’t want to. The women’s role in Latin America is to please the man. You don’t say, “Well I’m sorry but you are at risk of becoming infected so I’d like to protect you”. You say, “Well, okay if you don't want to, we won't.” This is even if the man knows the woman is positive.

How much does a positive woman really assess the risk in terms of preventing other people from becoming infected? You can promote condoms, saying they should be used for the rest of your life, but this is a very difficult thing for a woman to do. It does depend on the power relation that exists with their partners and their ability to talk about sexual matters with them. If you don’t engage in safe sex, what do you do to prevent yourself or your partner from becoming infected? In the UK, there is much more openness when talking about sex but not in discussing risk.

I learned about HIV when I was 20 and I grew up with HIV as part of my life, directly or indirectly. I remember going to clubs when I was 20 and one of my friends was wearing condoms as earrings, showing that we should think about it. But I did not assess my own risk correctly.

Many women believe that being HIV positive is retaliation for some wrong doing. They need to see HIV as just an accident – just as you might have a car accident or lose your job - rather than as something to be blamed for. Then you can stop thinking of HIV as that enormous, unknown thing and put it into context. That is when you can say, this is just another thing that has happened to me and I need to learn from it.

Alejandra