Bill Gates, who is spearheading a host of social service programmes through his NGO Gates Foundation, was moved to tears after hearing the heart-wrenching tale of a sex worker. The incident took place during one of his several visits to the country, reveals a new book exploring the plight of sex workers in India.
Authored by Ashok Alexander, who headed the Gates Foundation’s HIV/AIDS prevention programme Avahan for over 10 years, the book titled A Stranger Truth: Lessons in Love, leadership and Courage from India’s Sex Workers recounts true stories of the lives of sex workers in India, that are about finding hope and redemption amid heartbreak and despair.
The incident took place in the early 2000s when a woman confided in Bill Gates about how she had hidden the fact that she was a sex worker from her daughter, who was then in high school. When her classmates found out, the daughter was relentlessly teased, harassed and ostracised, and soon went into depression.
“One day her mother came home to find her child hanging from the ceiling fan, and a note left behind saying she could not take it anymore. I noticed that Bill, next to me, had his head down and was crying quietly,” Alexander recalls in this book, published by Juggernaut.
During their visits, Bill and wife Melinda had the ability to completely shut out everything extraneous and focus on the community of sex workers, the author says.
“They sat cross-legged on the floor, facing the community members who were sitting in a small circle. Melinda asked some of them if they would relate their stories. All the tales were sad ones – of rejection, utter poverty, and then somewhere a spark of hope. They were brutally honest and raw,” the author recalls in the book
Alexander left a high-profile corporate job to head Avahan in 2003, he was plunged into an India far removed from the comfort zones he had lived and worked in all his life, PTI reported.
“When I left McKinsey, it was not just a step out, it was two steps out, because I went from a kind of poverty we glimpse, to an India I didn’t know existed,” says Alexander told Firstpost.com. Avahan, was a key player in HIV prevention in India, credited by the Lancet, a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal, with preventing an estimated 6,06,000 HIV infections from 2003-2013.
In 2003, when the HIV epidemic was at its worst in India, an estimated 2.6 million people were infected. Today, 2.1 million people are HIV+ in the country, with a prevalence of 0.22 percent.
