TT: Peter paying for Paul

Police took two sick young boys away from their Carenage home yesterday, after an anonymous caller told them the children were being neglected by their mother.

Police found the boys, aged six and four, emaciated and covered with sores and rashes.

Their 27-year-old mother told police the children were HIV-positive.

The boys were lying helpless in the living room of the house yesterday morning when police and a Guardian team arrived.

They appeared to be weak, dehydrated and in need of medical attention.

Their mother told police the children have been sick for more than three years, since the death of their father.

She said at that time, she took the children to Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, Mt Hope, where they were diagnosed as being HIV-positive, and treated.

The mother, who is also HIV-positive, recently got a job.

She said she had not taken the children for medical treatment because she did not want to expose the children and herself to public scrutiny and discrimination.

“Their father died of AIDS, and since then they have been sick. I did not want to lose my job. That is why I keep it as a secret all this time,” she said.

I wonder what is being said now by those sons of bitches who preach and practice that a "deputy's essential"? With fierce diseases like HIV/AIDS ravaging the Caribbean, isn't it high time that Caribbeanites abandon their loose-and-leggo sexual morés for a more conservative lifestyle that will not bring such horrible death and suffering to ourselves and our children? When will some Caribbean men stop deluding themselves that being the man on top doesn't make them homosexual? When will Caribbeanites set aside sexual promiscuity for abstinence before marriage, marriage, and fidelity within marriage? The Uganda model has shown that that is the only way to beat AIDS. Perhaps it is time for Caribbean governments to stigmatize illegitimacy once again and to make sex outside of marriage a crime. But then, if they did that, half of the police force might wind up in jail.