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LOST IN THOUGHT: Mahoro

MAHORO, A 43-year-old Rwandan asylum seeker, finds it hard to sleep these days.

Diagnosed with HIV in 2003, she lives in constant fear of immigration officers bursting into her home to hustle her away to a detention centre.

After all, the Home Office has turned her application down five times and immigration has come for her twice – once so early in the morning that she was not properly dressed.

“When they took me to the detention centre, I thought this would be the end of medication (and) monitoring,” recalled Mahoro, who is appealing the Home Office’s decision.

“I felt like life should stop then. Taking medication was a problem because one of the medications wasn’t available to me where I lived so I had to wait until they brought it to me. I once stayed four days without medication.”

She was later released but the waiting plays havoc with her mind. “I thought policemen were always looking for me. I couldn’t sleep thinking they were coming for me every day,” she told The Voice.

It wasn’t what Mahoro envisioned when she was smuggled out of a Rwandan prison and taken to the UK more than five years ago.

Married to a former soldier, who testified against genocide perpetrators in Rwanda, she watched in horror as he was stabbed to death one night outside their front door.

Already traumatised, Mahoro was later jailed, and wrongly accused of protecting trained witness killers who reportedly came from her tribe.

While in prison, she was raped by her jailers.

After a month of hell, Mahoro said she grabbed the chance to escape when a friend came to help her one night.

Now in the hands of western strangers, Mahoro said she eventually found herself in the UK’s asylum system – alone after her guide disappeared.

It was only when she did a UK health check that she realised she was HIV positive. “To me, it was a double tragedy, knowing what I had gone through (the rape) and now I have HIV. I said it would be a miracle if I survive,” she said.

But she learned to adjust, helped by counselling and a support group.

Mahoro has been on HIV treatment for several years but it has been rough. She has developed resistance to two combinations of medication.

Now on her third batch of drugs, Mahoro fears being sent back to Rwanda, where, she said, a key drug she needs is not available.

“When I think of Rwanda where there is no medication, my next stage is to be buried,” she said.

Immigration has told her she has not provided enough evidence of persecution and has countered her HIV treatment argument.

“I am frustrated and hopeless. I think when you are an asylum seeker, you are not a human being. That was taken away from me. I am just a number moving around,” Mahoro said. “It is nearly too much for me. I can see how unfair the world can be. It’s as if I don’t deserve life. Somebody can deny me life.”

Mahoro and lobby group, the African HIV Policy Network (AHPN) are fighting for better treatment for people like her.

“It is simply inhumane to give the promise of life and then take it back,” said Rhon Reynolds, AHPN’s deputy CEO.

AHPN has launched Destination Unknown, a campaign to highlight the severe impact on HIV positive people’s health and wellbeing when they are threatened with deportation or sent back to their countries without adequate support and medication.

The campaign says such action contradicts the UK’s policy aim of universal access to HIV treatment for all those who need it by 2010.

“HIV treatment enables people to live healthy and productive lives and reduces the chances of onward transmission. The threat of deportation can push people underground, leading to destitution and exploitative and dangerous living conditions,” Reynolds added.

About 50 per cent of women seeking asylum in the UK are rape survivors, said lobby group, Black Women’s Rape Action Project (BWRAP). Statistics show fewer than 24,000 asylum applications were made last year. A small number of asylum seekers are HIV positive, AHPN said.

Published: 01 December 2008
Issue: 1349

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