LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS POSITIVELY: Personal Testimonies
By Reverend Moses Taku

“HIV has given me a better opportunity to serve God.”

My names are Reverend Moses Taku, from Menji in the Lebialem Division of the South West Province.  I was born in Kumba in Meme Division some forty years ago and attended school in the Government Technical College, Ombe, and was trained as an electrician.  I worked in that trade in Kumba after graduation.  Things were moving well for me until 1992 when the political upheavals of the time came and upset everything.

As things became bleaker for honest people like us, I started thinking of alternate avenues to make a living.  It was then that I met a Pastor of the Anglican Church of Cameroon.  He invited me to their church on several occasions and later asked me to accompany him to Bamenda.  I later engaged myself in training in the theology.  Between 1994 and 1998, I studied theology in a neighbouring country and became a full pastor by 1999.

In the year 2000, I got married to a Bali girl and we moved down to Kumba, where I became a lead pastor at the big church there.  By 2002, my wife, Grace, gave birth to a boy.  At the age of six months, my boy had boils that never went away.  The doctor told me that persistent boils can be a sign of HIV infection.  My son was tested for HIV and found to be positive.  I was also forced by my close friend, Doctor Ayuk, to be tested, and I was found to be HIV positive, but I did not tell my wife!  (This turned out to be the most fatal error of my life).

All I did was suggest to her that we return to Bamenda, which we did in 2003.  There, I got a job in a prominent church in town.  All the while, I never told my wife the truth of my HIV status.  She soon fell ill in October of 2004.  She was positive.  Her health deteriorated rapidly and she was hospitalised for six months, while I had joined a Christian Support Group out of town.  We discussed each other’s situations in the group, including how to live positively with the virus.  While my CD4 count was improving, my wife’s situation worsened.  I had nothing to tell her, but encourage her to believe that dying was nothing to be afraid of.  I told her that it simply meant she was going to be with Christ.  I remember the moment when she was dying, waving goodbye to me because she was too weak to speak.  Before she died she said she had never known anyone who cared for her like I did.  I felt a tinge of guilt as shed said this, as I know that if I had revealed my status to her, we could have managed the situation together.

After my wife died my son needed hospital treatment too, but he died the following year.  I ran up medical bills for my wife’s treatment and my son’s as well.  By the grace of God and with the love and support of the religious Support Group in Bamenda and other friends, those bills have all been paid.

I was invited to meet members of all the support groups at a conference in Mutengene.  The organisers invited me because they knew my HIV-positive status.  I challenged the members of the audience to say how many were HIV-positive, but none had even been tested for HIV so they didn’t know.  Afterwards, I learned that 25 pastors were tested for HIV.  After the conference, the Provincial Technical Group (P.T.G) for South West invited me, and I spent six moths with different organisations involved in HIV and AIDS work, gaining skills and experience.

Lesson: There is nothing surprising about HIV

If religious leaders are able to translate the problem of HIV into ways of serving and pleasing God, that will be true worship for every religion, because all religions encourage compassion for other human beings.  We must transform HIV into an opportunity for productive ideas and the overcoming of ignorance.  But first we must admit our ignorance and create room for caring, loving and supporting people living with HIV.

I have learned that HIV has given me a better opportunity to serve God.  Theology is about how to deal with what is happening on earth in relation to God.  The earth doesn’t exist on its own, but has an owner, God.  The earth has different religious groups, all owing their existence to God.  Human life is the greatest asset that God has.

The theological significance of HIV is not that it is neither a sign of rejection by God, nor an evil to be dreaded, or a curse to be avoided.  God provides a solution for every problem.  We should be able to translate HIV into a better way of achieving God’s purpose for human society.

For God, there is nothing surprising about HIV.  We must transform it into things like compassion, non-discrimination, and non-judgment in order to alleviate our sufferings.