Roman
43 years old
Moscow
Roman was born in Rostov-on-Don, in 1999 he got to know about his HIV-status.
He got infected by injection while taking drugs. Until 2003 Roman couldn’t accept his status. After a suicide attempt and searching for himself he went to the Protestant church where he got rehabilitation and then he had been supporting HIV-positive people.
After getting a degree in “Religion studies”, he had been working as a teacher for some years. Now he calls himself “neo-Protestant”, works in a private clinic of HIV treatment as a peer counselor.
In 2003 he got some difficulties with a ceremony of deacon consecration.
The Church was against because of Roman’s HIV- status.
Then for the same reason, his parents faced the violence from the side of his ex-wife’s relatives.
One more thing happened when Roman worked in a school. Parents of students demanded to fire the teacher after finding out about his status. Although the law supported him, Roman had to leave his profession.
“The discrimination is based on a sin. The base of a sin is a pretense of being valued. It can be achieved in two ways: either to become better or to demonstrate that someone is worse than you. In this case, people try to find negative sides in others: HIV, the experience of taking drugs, having served time in prison, they try to show up against this background”.
