In 2001, Maurine Murenga was pregnant and HIV-positive. She was living in Kenya, and a counselor encouraged her to fill out a memory book. She wrote directions to her village, details about her family so that when she died, someone would know where to bury her and where to send her child.
“It was nothing like preparing,” says Murenga. “It was actually preparing us for death.”
What seemed so unfair to Murenga is that she knew that in the United States and in Europe, there were drugs that could save her life. Antiretroviral drugs, or ARVs, had been widely available in the West since 1997, but they were too expensive for most Africans on the continent. Murenga became a vocal advocate, publicly disclosing her status, lobbying the Kenyan government and the world to make the life-saving drugs more accessible.
“It took a lot of pushing and pulling and wishing we could inject them with compassion to save lives,” she says.
Over the next few years, countries like South Africa took principled stands, fighting against patents that kept countries from making more affordable, generic versions of the drugs. AIDS activists across the world banded together to lobby rich countries to end what many scientists called a crime against humanity.
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