With their clear gaze and innocent smiles, these fourteen children represent thousands upon thousands of other guiltless victims just like them scattered across Thailand. They were born with AIDS virus that was their inheritance from their parents. But growing with HIV is not their only misfortune. The society that surrounds them also conspires to stigmatise them by cutting them off from the world of normal people; they are forced to struggle against one more virulent disease, namely the ‘virus of prejudices.’
You do know that “people living AIDS and HIV can live among us.” Or don’t you?
If you don’t believe it, ask any doctor that you know. He or she will confirm this. Why, then, do we feel compelled to hide the faces of these innocent children from the society of the normal, assiduously keeping them out of the mass media, as if they were the shameful faces of sinful criminals? In truth, they are heroes. Just being able to survive, to live to see another day, is for them an act of tremendous heroism.
Let’s end it now, the prejudice against and the stigmatisation of those living with AIDS and HIV, be they children or adults, so that we can live together in peaceful co-existence.

Safari 2005