A Cry from the Heart

A copy of this moving letter was given to the ACET Czech team by a young girl with HIV in their country.

“We are still alive, yet we do not live any more”. I plea to you to publish my letter.

I am 18 years old. My name is Olga. I was taken ill of AIDS two years ago. I am in hospital.  Why have you, you adults, thrown us under a tank? Why have you disrupted us with sex, pornography and drugs? We were very children and our fathers offered us to others to bed. And our mothers received money for us, their children. It is you who are guilty in our illnesses and death!

You adults wanted “freedom”, “relaxation” and “enjoyment”. You approved pornography, wanted more money. You advocate “free relations”, doing everything to satisfy your desires. But we are dying! We will never get to know real love, we will not have families, we will not have our own children.

We are still alive, yet we do not live any more in fact. You stole our childhood and our future too. When I meet old people in the street, I have very strange feelings, I cannot even describe them. There is anger, wrath, fear, envy, helplessness and inability to change anything. Too late. We who are young and are dying, do not know what real love is, we do not understand words like “shyness”, “morality”. The meaning of all these words has disapeared both from the schools and the life too.

You were taught their meaning then and that is why you can live 70, 80 and more years. But we will not live these years! We will die young! What for? Why? Four of my friends, used to be my schoolmates, have died already. Youth lays in mortuaries. We are burying each other already.

Why have you not warned us of your “safe sex”? We want to live. We would rather work hard on a field, drive a tractor than drive cars of foreign makes and dying of AIDS. AIDS and syphilis have become something as normal among us as a flue.

We were children, we had no idea how babies are born, we thought that storks bring them. If only did we stay in this children´s ignorance and did not get to know your abuse.

Nobody is going to take you to court on our behalf. You did not kill any of us with your own hands after all. You were disrupting our lives gradually, bringing us up on your “pictures”, your films. In schools you were talking us into how to do “it” safely in cellars and forced on us devastating films and magazines.

You have not stopped that yet, you are going on, destroying lives of even younger children than we were. Have you not had enough? Has not there been enough sacrifice yet?

How grateful I would be now to the one who would have snatched cigarette out of my hand, who would have snatched syringe away from me, who would have slapped my face for offering my body to others, who would have talked to me about all this danger. How little could be done to get me out from under the tank when it was possible still. Please help those who need your help now. Be open for those who are serving these young people.

Olga - Russia 2001, Krasnodar region.