Supporting Women Living with HIV in Lithuania

Anna Zakowicz - Poland and Lithuania

Nov. 30, 2007—Where she lives, Anna Zakowicz laments, women living with HIV and AIDS are invisible.

“HIV-positive women are not involved in activities. They have no support, no advocacy, they don’t fight for their rights,” Anna says.

That’s why when Anna moved to Lithuania to teach English, she began volunteering at an association created by medical professionals to help people living with HIV/AIDS. Anna had contracted HIV years before when she battled drug addiction. That was before she left her native Poland for Lithuania, before she taught grade school and high school, before she finished college and earned her master’s degree.

Anna learned she was infected a week before her twenty-first birthday. She started using drugs in high school, when she was 16 and living in Bydgoszcz, a mid-sized Polish city. At 18, she began using heroin. The HIV infection spread quickly through the community of drug users, Anna says.

She discovered her own status when she went to a detox center in December 1993. At first, the news sent her into a tailspin, but ultimately she figured out that she had something to give back. While still in Poland, she lived and began volunteering at a rehabilitation center for drug users and people living with HIV and AIDS. She conducted workshops aimed at helping people build their self esteem and solve emotional problems. She also helped start a self-support group that provided legal and psychological services for former drug users and people living with HIV and AIDS.

As she volunteered to help people like herself, Anna went back to college and got a bachelor’s degree in English. She taught primary school and high school, then decided to pursue a master’s degree. Afterward, she moved to Lithuania to teach English at the Soros International House.

Now, Anna is the volunteer project manager for the Demetra Association of HIV Affected Women and their Intimates. She helps create and implement projects, translates, proofreads documents, represents the organization at international meetings and participates in working groups connected with AIDS. Recently, Anna has been working on publishing a brochure entitled “Healthy Lifestyle,” an easy-to-use, comprehensive guide to teach women and girls living with HIV what to eat, how to take care of themselves and where to seek medical help in order to remain healthy. She also volunteers for the Lithuanian AIDS Centre and has started a support group for former drug users and people living with HIV/AIDS.

Though there are relatively few HIV-positive women in Lithuania, Anna says they need much more support than they currently receive. According to the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, only 3,300 people in Lithuania, a country of more than 3.4 million, are reported to be living with AIDS, less than one-tenth of one percent of the population. The infection rate is so small compared to other countries around the world that international organizations do not break it down by gender. The Lithuanian AIDS Centre, a governmental agency, reports that the overwhelming majority of people infected with the virus are men, and that it is spread primarily through intravenous drug use.

There is only one AIDS center in the country, and it has only one gynecologist and three or four other specialists, Anna says. “It’s only like a clinic,” she says. “The service is very good. The doctors are perfect, but there are so few of them.”

According to Anna, there are too few professional women working on HIV/AIDS issues in Lithuania, especially those who are living with HIV. So, Anna says it will be up to her to lead workshops for HIV-positive women and girls and the specialists who work with them in Vilnius and nationwide.

At the Advancing Women’s Leadership and Advocacy for AIDS Action workshop in the summer of 2007, Anna says she learned communications skills, including advocacy, how to set goals, how to convey a message, how to deal with the public.

Anna says she would like to create a stronger network for women, to give them the kind of support she sought when she first moved to Lithuania. HIV-positive women there are stigmatized and discriminated against, Anna says, and that discourages many women from speaking out and working to improve care and programs. She wants to enhance advocacy on their behalf and mobilize decision makers – politicians, civil servants, journalists and doctors – to improve conditions for them.

“I need more women who are HIV positive and would like to be involved. Now I have more tools,” Anna said toward the end of the leadership workshop. “The government is doing well, but could do better. There is silence. We need to get women who work with HIV-positive women to get a bigger audience.”

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Anna participated in Advancing Women’s Leadership and Advocacy for AIDS Action, an initiative to equip and empower a cadre of women from around the world with the knowledge and skills to strengthen and lead the global response to AIDS.

You can read more about the initiative here.

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