Mexican Border Town Friend in Fight Against AIDS Amy Lieberman - The Christian Science Monitor
go to original July 16, 2013

Rosember López Samayoa founded a nonprofit group in Chiapas, Mexico, that helps migrants who are also LBGT and face two kinds of discrimination. (Amy Lieberman/The Monitor)

TAPACHULA, Mexico - When Rosember López Samayoa was diagnosed with HIV in 1995, he traveled the costly distance to Mexico City to receive affordable treatment. He then returned to this lackluster border city that hugs Guatemala and shut himself inside his house, ashamed to reveal the death prophecy a doctor had delivered.

But after 11 months Mr. López emerged – still alive, and with a commitment to help people in his hometown who could be vulnerable to HIV, or who, like him, are unable to access good and inexpensive local medical care.

The former accountant founded a nonprofit organization, Una Mano Amigo en la Lucha Contra Una Mano Amigo's Rosember López Samayoa helps those in Chiapas, Mexico, who bear a double stigma: migrants who also are LGBT.SIDA, or A Hand Friend in the Fight Against AIDS, in 2000. He began to recruit participants for sexual health and rights workshops.

Over the past 13 years, though, as Una Mano Amigo has expanded its reach across the southern portion of the Mexican state of Chiapas, the population the organization serves has also shifted.

... “Now what we’re seeing is a migration of people who are gay and trans[gender]. They come to us because they have HIV, and in their countries they couldn’t access the health care so they had to leave, but more than anything they are leaving because of violence,” López says.

Read the rest at The Christian Science Monitor

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