A student involved in the Special delivery campaign hands over her letter to UNICEF Representative, Bertrand Bainvel, at his office at 60 Knutsford Boulevard, New Kingston, last week. Mr. Bainvel promised to respond to the letter he received. - Contributed

Over the coming weeks, children living with HIV, supported by Panos Caribbean and The Gleaner Company, will be delivering letters advocating for positive change on the issues they have identified to influential movers and shakers in Jamaica.

A child delivered the following letter to:

Mr. Bertrand Bainvel

UNICEF Representative

60 Knutsford Boulevard

Kingston 5

November 9, 2007

Dear Mr. Bainvel,

Good day and congratulations on the very important work that UNICEF has been doing in Jamaica. I write to you today, not to ask you to change the world, but to ask you to help our parents and, in essence, us, children affected by HIV.

As the children of parents infected with the virus, we are often overlooked as not being directly impacted by HIV and, therefore, require less help. As you already know, this is not so. We are the ones who have to take care of our parents when they are sick.

Cook and clean

We are forced to go through each moment of their illness, including their mood swings. Some of us have to care for younger siblings and ourselves from very early. I have been cooking and cleaning since I was about five years old.

Frankly, at times, we do get frustrated and tired of doing these adult stuff, but our parents don't seem to understand. They believe we are ungrateful and uncaring. This leads to much verbal and physical abuse of us children who are affected. I know of instances where children are sexually abused and parents pretend they don't know it is happening.

I do not, by any means, hold my parent responsible for the ill-treatment towards me as I understand it must be very hard to balance the possibility of death alongside growing a child. Life does get overbearing and I guess abusing us is their way of dealing with it.

Parenting seminars

Mr. Bainvel, all I am asking on behalf of kids like myself, is that you help us to help our parents. I believe that parenting seminars should be a must for people living with HIV. It will help them to cope with dealing with us kids in a less abusive way. You could consider making it mandatory for all HIV programmes you fund to have parenting seminars built into them.

You could also use your office to speak more on the issue of parenting for the infected or sponsor research to find out how HIV has impacted on the parenting abilities of persons living with HIV. These suggestions will help to stop the abuse of affected children and prevent us from making some of the same mistakes they might have made. Help us to help our parents.