I can report one accomplishment in this new year: the book I’ve been promising is finally out. My biography is mostly about my personal journey from childhood to when I found out I was HIV-infected.

I vowed to have this book out after I was involved in a car accident. Were it not for God’s grace, I would be a goner and my memory faded from most people. Isn’t that what happens after most burials? As they say, life goes on.

After the accident, I realised I was taking too much for granted. I refocused on accomplishing the items on my to-do lists, which stretched for as long as I could remember: one of them was penning my bio.

The other side of Asunta

I had another reason to have this book out. People associate me with Aids. Most times, my name is mentioned in the same breath with the word “Aids”. I want to let people know – more so my kids – that Aids just gatecrashed later in life. I want them to know that their mother was born like other children and brought up in the village. I actually had a “normal” childhood.

I want folks to know the other side of Asunta. That I was your typical adolescent. Never mind that this is where things started happening. I had attended very strict schools and didn’t know what to do with all the freedom in college.

In the city, nobody cared what I did or didn’t do outside class. And there was peer pressure. I wanted to fit in the “college girl class”, which dictated that I drop my country bumpkin mentality and adapt to certain lifestyles.