HIV/AIDS
We help people to live with dignity.
AIDS is the most devastating pandemic humankind has ever faced, taking over 25 million lives in the last 25 years.
33.4 million people are currently living with HIV with millions more affected by parallel epidemics of poverty, stigma and discrimination.
What we're doing
Trócaire takes a dual approach to HIV - addressing it in all development programmes and supporting partners to ensure that communities have access to a range of prevention, care and treatment services and that, injustices that perpetuate the spread of the virus are challenged.
Currently we spend almost €3 million annually, supporting seven dedicated HIV programmes in Asia, Africa and Latin America and continue to promote a response to HIV in the organisation.
In sectors such as livelihoods, Trócaire is assisting partners to modify programmes for a world with AIDS, as families affected by HIV are often more vulnerable to food shortages. Programmes are also modified to be appropriate for child headed households, carers and for people with limited or no assets due to HIV and AIDS.
Trócaire works with organisations that provide prevention, care and treatment that supports national efforts, deals with the holistic needs of individuals and the poverty dimension of the epidemic. Income generating activities, life-skills, psychosocial support and education are considered integral parts of a holistic response to HIV. Underpinning all responses is a
commitment to address the gender dimension of the epidemic.
Crime fighter turned priest brings hope to Cambodia
Ed McGovern used to be a hard-nosed prosecutor in New York, bringing the bad guys to justice. Then he had a change of heart. The Irish-American crime fighter, who used to go after the gangsters and the hoods on the mean streets of the Big Apple, decided to become a priest.
Now Fr Ed McGovern (57), whose mother is from Co Cork, works with impoverished people infected with HIV in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. One of his tasks is to run a hospice where penniless HIV patients can die with dignity. There were times when he was virtually the only mourner at the cremation of patients who passed on.
He has met the widows and the orphans of those whose lives have been snatched away by AIDS. He and his colleagues try to ensure that the orphans are looked after, and don’t become slaves to the sinister people who traffic children on the streets of Phnom Penh.
A member of the Maryknoll Missionaries, his work is supported by Trócaire. Fr McGovern said he was deeply grateful for the assistance from Ireland. “I want to say ‘thank you’ to the Irish people, ‘thank you’ to those who donate to Trócaire,” he said.
Experts estimate that Cambodia will have 140,000 children orphaned to HIV. Fr McGovern reckoned that some of the harrowing homicide scenes he witnessed as a prosecutor prepared him for what he was to encounter in Cambodia.
After his arrival in Phom Penh, Fr McGovern visited a ward in a public hospital where 36 patients with AIDS lay on metal slabs with just a straw mat under them. People asked him how he could visit one of those awful places. He said: “You don’t know what I’ve seen.”
Fr McGovern said they used to lose ten patients a month at the hospice. In accordance with local custom, the body of a patient who died was placed on a straw mat, wrapped in cloth and taken on a flatbed truck to the local crematorium. “If the family has accompanied the person, they are there. But often the only people present might be myself and a staff member from the hospice,” he said. The stigma associated with the disease can frighten families into staying away.
Fr McGovern also talked of how important it was to care for children orphaned by AIDS – otherwise there was a danger these kids could end up on the streets, vulnerable to disease and human predators. The priest finds his work very fulfilling. “My mother would say, ‘you can’t go wrong if you make yourself useful.’ I think I am making myself useful.”
(Story by journalist Seán Boyne of the Sunday World who visited Cambodia with Trócaire)
