The following story was made possible by a commitment made at the Clinton Global Initiative’s (CGI) Annual Meeting in 2005. To learn more about how CGI commitments are impacting lives around the world, visit www.ClintonGlobalInitiative.org

She thought it was a routine appointment, but when Marie Claire went to a clinic in Rwanda, the doctor told her she was HIV-positive.

“Surviving the genocide, I did not believe that living with HIV/AIDS would be my fate,” she says. She was breast-feeding the youngest of her three children at the time, Bobette, and it turned out that she too was HIV-positive.

When Marie Claire joined Women for Women International she had just discovered her illness. She enrolled in the sponsorship program at their Women’s Opportunity Center in Kigali. Each month Marie Claire received cash, job skills training, rights awareness training and emotional support through letters from her Women for Women International sponsor in Pennsylvania.

Through her classes at the Women’s Opportunity Center, Marie Claire learned about how to live with HIV/AIDS and was able to prevent her newborn son from contracting the disease. She used the funds that she received from her sister sponsor to pay for medicine for the whole family and to send her daughter to school.

She was so inspired by the classes she took through Women for Women International that she became active in her community, passing on her knowledge. She has also decided to go back to school to become a nurse. Her life may be shortened because of the disease but the hope that she received through Women for Women International inspires her to keep fighting for herself and her family.

Since 1993, Women for Women International has moved 93,000 women from crisis to stability to active citizenship. In 2005, the organization made a CGI commitment to raise $14million to support the activities of 80 Opportunity Centers in eight conflict and post-conflict regions.
To find out more about Marie Claire and Women for Women International, please visit www.womenforwomen.org/claire/