Shocking: Ghanian HIV And AIDS Ambassador Lied To The Public About Her HIV Status

Piece by: Caren Nyota
Lifestyle

Why would one lie about her personal health status? Well, some do it just to benefit from well-wishers and also to satisfy their selfish interests. Ghanian Hiv/Aids Ambassador Joyce Dzidzor Mensah who lied about her HIV/ AIDS status after his lover died of the deadly disease.

Joyce has claimed over the years that she was HIV positive but was a healthy person because she was on antiviral drugs.She has had support and funding from several organizations, institutions, banks and civil society in her campaign across the country on how to prevent HIV and how persons who have tested positive can live healthily and happily with the virus.Here is the story

"I met a man in my church where I used to fellowship. We fell in love but I didn’t know of his HIV status.Though he knew he was HIV positive, he never told me. A member of the church who is a nurse once saw me with him and she called me to advise me. The nurse advised me to be careful with him because she knew of his HIV status. Unfortunately for me, I met the nurse just a day after I had sex with the man.

I then confided in the nurse and she asked me to quickly report at the hospital so that I can be given PEP (Post Exposure Profilaxis). I did exactly that in order not to contract the HIV virus.I became pregnant though, but I decided to keep the pregnancy.

My boyfriend fell sick and died before I had the baby. People stigmatized me without knowing if I contract HIV from him or not. I was eventually beaten and thrown out of the house I was living in with my parents. Having nowhere to stay, I went to live in the secretariat of the associations of persons living with HIV.

I prayed along and behaved as if I had HIV too just to have a place to lay my head and learn from people living with HIV. I attended a lot of workshops organized by NGO’s on HIV just to equip myself with information. I heard lots of HIV interesting stories from people on stigma related issues.

At a point in time, I accepted and lived like a person living with HIV. And I always told my story as if I was living with HIV, I shared my story based on what I went through just to let people know that people with HIV are normal human beings.

I would have contracted the virus and probably died but God saved me. That was why going to schools to educate them became my passion just for students to abstain from premarital sex.

I realized that there was no way of defending myself when people started gossiping about me in my neighbourhood. It was because my boyfriend in the church died of AIDS and my church members and neighbours knew he died of AIDS. There was no way I could ever defend myself.

At a point, I had to accept the situation at hand. I knew there was going to be a time the truth about my status was going to come out, and this is the time.I plead with the general public and my fans not to be disappointed in me for acting all these years. It was worth it because a lot of lives were saved through my advocacy work.

I also sincerely apologise to the hundreds of churches I have been to with my message both in Ghana and abroad to forgive me. I did it to fight HIV stigma and discrimination.I also plead with schools, institutions and banks who have all benefited from my story to forgive me.I now therefore want to thank all who have supported me throughout these years one way or the other.

I want to officially announce to the general public that I am no more the HIV ambassador due to the fact that the First Lady has been made the HIV ambassador".

Source:www.viasat1.com