Around the time I was there, a young girl who everyone had grown very close to had died. I had only been there a week. In her, they saw their own mortality and as did I.
I first visited Freedom Foundation, an HIV AIDS clinic in Bangalore, India in the early 2000s.
I was introduced to Ashok Rau and Karl Sequiera who started Freedom Foundation to help addicts. During the course of their treatment, they found that many were infected with the AIDS virus. It was then that they felt the need to start a clinic to treat HIV positive patients.
The clinic was on the outskirts of Bangalore in a suburban area. They had separate accommodations for men, women and children and a large compound for people to sit and talk. People who were infected would come from far away villages for treatment and found on getting here that there were others from their same village too. They were going further and further away for treatment for fear of stigma from their communities and in the process found a support system from within their own community.
I spent the first few days there just walking around the clinic and spent time with the adults and children, just talking, listening.
The next few weeks, I spent taking pictures and trying to understand the impact of the disease on people’s lives and their families. Families had been uprooted, men had sometimes abandoned their wives who were infected, and older parents were unable to cope with their adult child being sick. They lacked support and infrastructure. Some of the younger children had been abandoned and everyone in the clinic functioned as a family taking care of the children.
I made many trips over the course of five years. They opened another center in Hyderabad and then a few more. On my return to the clinic in Bangalore, I hoped that I would see these children again, hoping that they had somehow fought through the illness with support and medication. I knew that many of the adults had already passed on.