ACDs New Journal: AIDS and the Future of Women - Chronicle of a Movement

AIDS and the Future of Women -- le SIDA et le Future des Femmes

Introductions first: Hello all. My name is Anne-christine d’Adesky, and I’m a woman of many parts. One of them is being a journalist, or better, a chronicler of the events of my time and the worlds I inhabit. For me, like many of the colleagues and people you’ll meet in the days ahead, AIDS and the global grassroots movement to stop this epidemic has become my world, my global community, my cause – the ties that bind. I’ve been involved in the AIDS battle since 1982 – since the earliest days. I came of age as an activist and human rights advocate in what has become a great social and political movement. Sometimes I think of it as my own journey, sometimes as a party, because of the excitement and great people I have met in this movement.

All along the way, while my focus in this movement has changed, I’ve kept my eye on women, and now by extension, children, and especially girls. I became a passionate advocate and that passion and compassion has fused my journalism and my creative work as a writer and sometime filmmaker and always dreamer. Today, I helped start and run a free AIDS treatment program in Rwanda, benefiting mostly women survivors of genocidal rape and their children, and orphans of AIDS and the genocide. I am a mother too, of an 8-year old girl. I continue to travel as I have always been privileged to do, but always with a sense of mission, to connect with others, to do some good, especially around AIDS.

Here now, 25 years later, a quarter-century if I can believe it, I see the start of a new movement – really a deepening, a defining, of a splinter movement that has its roots in different and deep social struggles, particularly the fight for women’s rights, the fight against poverty, and the fight against HIV and AIDS. We – the broad, still loose collective of advocates and women living with HIV who come together to define this battle – call it the movement of women fighting HIV and AIDS. I privately call it something else - -the vision I have for what is at stake and what must be defined: the Future of Women – and Girls.
Welcome to my chronicle of the movement – un chronique du movement. A movement that is global, multilingual, and in which I remain fiercely committed. Adelante!