KEY POINTS:
You can be a hero," said the young woman. "There is a hero in you." Memory Phiri believes anyone can do something of heroic stature. She did.
Diminutive, with eyes almost as big as her hooped earrings, she looks a slip of a schoolgirl sitting in the green room backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. But she has come a long way from the village in Zambia, where she was raped when she was 9, to become one of the world's most persuasive Aids campaigners. Now just 20, she was about to address 4000 people.
The occasion was a concert to mark the 50th anniversary of VSO, the charity once known as Voluntary Service Overseas, one of three supported by this year's Independent Christmas Appeal. On stage were South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and internationally renowned African artists, including Angelique Kidjo. Yet Memory seemed unfazed.
Eleven years ago, Memory and her sister, who was 14, had accepted a lift home from a man in a lorry after visiting her sister's dying husband.
After dropping off the older girl, the man raped the 9-year-old. That same year, her mother died (her father had died when she was 7) and the children were split up.
When she was 13, she was sent to the City of Hope orphanage just outside the capital, Lusaka. It has links with the Zambia Open Community Schools project, which provides a free basic education to 16,000 orphans in a country where, still, a third of children between 7 and 13 (mostly girls) do not attend school. VSO provides many of the teachers and assists with books, clothing and food.
The Salesian nuns who ran the orphanage discovered Memory was HIV-positive. "They didn't tell me immediately," she says. "I was the only one of the 84 girls who was positive." But one of the other pupils overheard and graffiti appeared.
"The other girls right away didn't want to play with me. They even refused to eat with me. I went to see the nun in charge, an Italian named Sister Maria, who sent me to see a counsellor. The counsellor gave me a lot of information about HIV.
"I thought, 'Why is she telling me all this?' And then it clicked, and I started crying. It was the saddest moment in life. My grandmother had just died. My two young brothers were 8 and 10; who was going to look after them?"
Sister Maria arranged for Memory to meet counsellors who were HIV-positive. "That gave me great courage," Memory says. "I thought, 'If they can live with it then I can'."
But the other girls continued to shun her. At this point, Memory took a courageous step. "With Sister Maria's help, I called them into groups and told them my story. All the girls wept when they heard. They thought that to have HIV must mean you were a prostitute or had been sleeping around with boys." The school bully, who had written the graffiti, apologised to Memory. "A number of girls had been raped too but had never been able to talk about it.
They came to me privately and told me their story. It all changed. Everyone was kind."
Her HIV counsellors were impressed by the skill with which she handled her peers and arranged counselling training. She was put on anti-retroviral drugs and her body continues to respond to the therapy.
"I have to take my medicine at 7am and 7pm, and can't miss by more than 30 minutes," she says. "I have to eat lots of nutritious vegetables. But it is important to feed the mind too; if you say, 'I will die soon', you will; but if you say, 'I will see my children's children' then you take control.
"When you have a car, it is you who is the driver, and you tell the virus, which is the passenger, where it will go. I feel much healthier now." The advice she gives herself is the same as she now delivers to HIV-positive people the world over.
The process has helped her come to terms with the rape, but it has taken five or six years. Memory was the first girl in Zambia to say she had HIV. She attended conferences in South Africa, Malawi, Nigeria and New York where she addressed the United Nations "to tell them how people in the rural areas with HIV are still neglected".
"I feel proud of myself. By the time I die, I know I'll have had an impact on many people's lives. I've tried to do my best."
Her favourite technique in dealing with children orphaned by HIV, or who have the virus, is a hero book.
"In it, you look back. You write down your happiest moment, your saddest one, and tell the story of someone who has been a hero in your life. Not Superman or even Nelson Mandela. It can be anyone whose courage you admire. A hero is a person who has overcome a problem without hurting others."
So who is her hero? "Sister Maria. She is strong, hardworking. She's like my mother, caring and kind. She gave me hope when I had none."
Memory has been catching up on her education and calculates she will be a doctor by the time she is 31.
"I know people who are not HIV-positive who have no hope for life. But me, every morning, I smile and say, 'It's a new day and I'm breathing'. There is a strength in all of us; we just have to find it."
- INDEPENDENT
