Geisha Kow­lessar

Cov­er­ing the walls of ses­sion room one of the Wash­ing­ton Con­ven­tion Cen­tre in DC yes­ter­day was the Aids memo­r­i­al quilt. Each patch tells a sto­ry of some­one who lost the fight against the dis­ease. But it al­so de­tailed that per­son's tribu­la­tions and courage to live even while star­ing death in the face. Unit­ed States Sec­re­tary of State, Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton, who spoke at the 19th Aids con­fer­ence, de­scribed the quilt as a sym­bol of so­lace for HIV/Aids peo­ple around the world. She said: "This is a vis­i­ble way to ho­n­our and re­mem­ber... to mourn hus­bands, wives, broth­ers, sis­ters, sons daugh­ters, part­ners. In 1996 was the last time the quit could be dis­played all at once... it just got too big, too many peo­ple ke p t dy­ing. "We are all here to­day be­cause we want to bring about that mo­ment when we stop adding names to the quilt. When we come to gath­er­ings like this one and not talk about the fight against Aids, but in­stead com­mem­o­rate the birth of a gen­er­a­tion that is free from Aids."

Clin­ton al­so urged lead­ers take "coun­try own­er­ship" in the fight against HIV/Aids, say­ing there was hope for a gen­er­a­tion to be free of the dis­ease. The con­fer­ence has drawn close to 20,000 del­e­gates and will end on Sat­ur­day. Say­ing HIV/Aids was still in­cur­able, Clin­ton said reach­ing that goal of erad­i­cat­ing the dis­ease was still in the dis­tant fu­ture. But, she added it has al­ready be­gun with moth­er-to-child pre­ven­tion. She al­so urged gov­ern­ments to in­vest more in so­cial worke rs. She added that with that task it must be en­sured ef­forts and ini­tia­tives be prop­er­ly led and im­ple­ment­ed and would reach com­mu­ni­ties and civ­il so­ci­ety. Some peo­ple chose to live in the shad­ows rather than come and open­ly dis­close their sta­tus, Clin­ton said.