Loving them despite AIDS tag

NST: KUALA LUMPUR: The first time Angel saw the leaves on a tree rustling in the wind, she started shaking in fear. She had never seen anything like it before.
She was abandoned as a baby and had spent her entire life in a welfare home, with no tree or bush in sight.
A couple heard her story over the radio and decided they wanted her, even though she was HIV-positive.
When Dominic Damian, 52, brought Angel home, she was so fearful she didn’t move for six hours. Today, Angel, now 10, smiles shyly in return when one smiles or blows kisses at her.
"Every child has a right to parents and a normal life," Damian said in an interview at his home recently.
"True, when someone is HIV-positive there are many issues involved. But we’re all family, that’s all."
Angel is not only HIV-positive, she is under-developed for her age and is a slow learner. Her adoptive parents have just learned she has a brain tumour.
After 18 years of marriage and four adopted children, Damian proudly declared: "These are all ours. We have told them all that they are adopted and we are a family through nurture, not nature."
Couples like the Damians are living the message of what International AIDS Memorial Day, which falls today, is all about.
Apart from honouring the memory of those lost to AIDS, it is also a day to show support for those living with HIV and AIDS, to raise community awareness and involvement in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Malaysian AIDS Council president Dr Adeeba Kama- rulzaman, quoting South African Supreme Court Justice Edwin Cameron, who is HIV-positive, said there is a need to "normalise" HIV/ AIDS.
"In Malaysia, we seem to be moving forward but we will always be two steps behind," she said.
This is because the number of non-governmental organisations, doctors and government departments involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS was still too small, she explained.
"Other government agencies, aside from the Health Ministry and departments under it, are not stepping up to the plate."
Dr Adeeba says the community needs to better understand the disease in order to overcome the stigma and discrimination.
HIV-positive couples like Ali, 45, and Aminah, 33, (names have been changed), strive to live normal lives. Married just over a year ago, they each have children from previous marriages.
Ali, who does not have a fixed income, has a 11- year-old son and Aminah has three children, including a nine-year-old boy who is HIV-positive.
Caring for three healthy children and one HIV-positive child when the parents themselves carry the virus is a challenge like no other.
Asked whether he had considered this before marrying Aminah, Ali said: "Yes, but more importantly, she loves me and her children accept me.
"I thought, ‘my child gets a mother and her kids get a father’. We want a complete life too."
Aminah, who has cervical cancer, said she had thought many times of what would happen to all four children.
"I want to see my kids grow up and I always pray, asking God to lengthen my life," she said.
Said Ali: "If we think too much, we’ll be messed up. The least I can do is to prepare, like deciding where the children will go when we die.
"We don’t have anything any more. We’re just waiting to die. The only thing we have now are our children."