Social

Abstract

The women look scared. Twenty of them sit in dejected silence on low benches in the lobby of the crumbling 1960s health centre on the edge of Mathare North, a Nairobi slum. They are staring blankly and in a state of shock. These women, all in the early stages of pregnancy, have just had what must seem to them a dreadful judgement delivered upon them. When they visited the health centre for what might be their first and only formal health check during their pregnancy a blood test revealed they were HIV+. The diagnosis would have sounded like a death knell. Most would imagine they would die as outcasts from their families, after being shunned and neglected, unable to protect their orphaned children. They looked defeated, desperate and haunted.