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The Global Fund is also assisting the world's largest HIV positive support network, INP+, the Indian Network for People Living with HIV/AIDS. Like a giant web stretching across India, many of its 50,000 members work as volunteers alongside professionals, reaching even the most remote rural villages with condoms and prevention education, sympathy, advice and medical care. INP+ is also clawing away at social stigma. Its strategy is simple: be seen leading an active life with HIV/AIDS and the fear which feeds discrimination will eventually fade.
In the ragged provincial town of Singarayakonda, near the south coast of Andhra Pradesh, a Global Fund-supported Positive Living Centre has recently opened its door. It's a vital link to closed rural communities, where talk of sex is taboo and unmarried girls are kept indoors after they reach puberty. Poverty drives the men into construction work in the cities; they are away for months on end, some returning home with HIV/AIDS.
The Positive Living Centre offers help to those who once had no one to turn to. It runs group meetings so people realize they're not alone, plus counseling, medical treatment and advocacy - all doled out by HIV positive staff with their own stories of surviving the stigma and re-building their health and lives. If you can't come to them, they go to you.
Outreach worker, Anu Radha, regularly visits the coastal village of Pakala, a huddle of huts clinging to the low rise of the sandhills. Many local men follow the money to work in construction in the cities, leaving the colourful traditional boats idle on the beach.
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