From coast to coast and across the World Wide Web, Positive Women’s Network – USA members took advantage of National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NWGHAAD), March 10, and the days before and after to raise awareness: both to the fact that women are still vulnerable to HIV and about the unique challenges facing them. From hosting or co-hosting special events, like PWN-USA Philadelphia and PWN-USA Ohio did, to speaking at existing events, like PWN-USA Colorado and PWN-USA Georgia did, to writing wonderful blogs like PWN-USA Bay Area did, our members went above and beyond to make sure that the women who needed to hear the message heard it. PWN-USA also released our community-based participatory research report on March 10, detailing the barriers to care so many women living with HIV face, in a webinar, and continued the conversation on Twitter with our partners at Greater Than AIDS and The Well Project. The PWN-USA Ohio event inspired this lovely poem by Princess:

We are family and Sisters.

Give Love to one another, know matter what the issue my be; we all have the same thing in common, called the Virus, that continues to spread. It’s been around over 30 years.

We, as Sisters, understand one another’s feeling and love each other for who we are. We don’t expect anything from one another.

We will show our Love to each other, and say, “I understand, and together, we will overcome this Virus.”

Think positive, encourage one another, when one feels down, pick her up and give her a  loving Sister hug and say, “It’s OK, you’re going to be all right.”

Stand by each other, whether you are black or white, or in-between, in showing one another the Sister hugs. Just because we have the Virus, we are not going to let it get us down, but instead pick us up, and encourage us to pick each other up.

With our Faith, we  travel through the New Beginning of a New Day as we walk day by day, encouraging our Sisters and ourselves in saying, “We are someone and will always  be somebody,” to encourage other Sisters in fighting this Virus called HIV & AIDS.

From Sister with HIV