Alisha

Who is Alisha?
- This is her Story.

A ten year old girl. Always the same story... Her father, a trucker without a school who crossed the state of Rajasthan every day, contracted HIV and developed the disease in silence for fear of stigma and social rejection that entails in India. Without medical treatment, he infected his mother and died in his truck. And with hardly any resources, there were no drugs that prevented Alisha, at birth, from getting the virus.

Mother and daughter, both with the HIV mark, condemned to rejection and indifference, were living under the highway bridge to Delhi. On his third birthday his mother gave her a yellow kurti with flowers embroidered in turquoise. Alisha smiled, but only until the woman had another coughing attack. She watched her mother agonize for two days until she died at night, while sleeping next to her. Alone and repudiated by society, Alisha wandered the road...

And what is the end of this story? Most likely, what usually happens is that two weeks later, a merchant would find in the gutter the body of a girl dressed in a grimy yellow kurti ...

But it was not so for her; Alisha had the great fortune that a woman, an angel who founded the only home for children with HIV in Jaipur, stopped her ramshackle van and picked her up.

Today Alisha goes to public school with her brown uniform. She is a very applied student and dreams of being a doctor. And although she has to keep the secret of her illness, she is always kind and affectionate. Medical treatment supports her weak immune system and allows her to lead the life of one more girl. He loves to eat chapati with vegetables and lentils, dance and play hide and seek.

Today Alisha smiles every day with her friends, companions... sisters. All of them with the same fate, all with the winning ticket of that lottery of life and death.

THIS IS OUR OBJECTIVE: 100 GIRLS AS ALISHA, 100 LIVES