It is peaceful here", she said, in answer to my silent question as I looked around the large hospital room with rows of empty beds. The smell of hospitals always makes me queasy.

"You like it here?" I asked gently, avoiding her gaze - unsure of how to be encouraging and sympathetic without breaking down.

"It is nice here. It is like coming home. There is no noise - nobody stressing you about how to be or not to be. It is nice. It allows me to rest".

Her voice was strong and clear, an instant contradiction to her feeble, weak, thin body lying covered on the slightly propped-up hospital bed.

I had walked into the room expecting this, even worse. When I was told she was in critical condition, my mind prepared for the worst for this lovely soul - a young woman infected with HIV.

Little girl

I knew her many years back as a little girl. Bright, beautiful, sharp, ambitious - extremely ambitious. Time had yawned long and winding between us and today after our lives both took different turns, we were united in this hospital ward, unable to say exactly what was on our minds.

"You have to eat. Try and eat. The drugs need to fight this battle alongside a strong body. Just force yourself and eat, even if you do not feel like it," I begged her gently, reaching for the plate of untouched food. "We have to win this fight," I attempted weakly, wondering to myself if I was indeed convinced of what I was saying.

You see, I was at her bedside at a time when all the signs seemed bad. Her liver had collapsed. Her CD4 count was at a meagre 67, and she had a severe case of meningitis. The prognosis was bad.

Positivism was, therefore, a distant dream - something that would only thrive in the empty parodies of meaningless words.

I looked into her eyes for the first time since I walked into the ward and actually registered instant physical pain slashing across my heart. Surely, does suffering have to be this intense? If there was life in her eyes, then it was held hostage by wide enlarged pupils competing for space with disturbing bright yellow eyes, a mark of serious liver and kidney failure.

The face that stared back at me from sunken cheekbones and frail frame shrunken by sickness was barely recognisable as that of the young, beautiful girl I used to know. My heart wept for her.

"I am much stronger now than when I came. I think in about a week, I will be out of here. (She sighed deeply). This thing is hard, very hard," she said mixing her fate with the disarming determination that she would surely rise up from the sickbed and live again.

I am flipping through brochures by a network of strong women daring the Aids under the banner of Centre for Development and Population Activities (Cedpa).

As you read this, some brave women from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, amongst other countries, are meeting in Nairobi under the theme: "When women move forward, the world moves with them".

For them, HIV and Aids is not only about the statistics and its rapid spread - it is about how livelihoods are affected and about the many women on whose pain the battle against this tragedy is fought. Today, 22.5 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to be living with HIV. Of these, 61 percent are women.

It is through Cedpa that I am criss-crossing countries to encounter women of courage whose dry bones, emaciated from the devastation of HIV and Aids have defied time and endeavoured to live again.

I am awed by the courage of Pastor Annie Kaseketi Mwaba from Zambia. She is a church minister who has buried her husband and four children, as Aids snatched her family members one after the other.

"I thought HIV was for people who do not go to church. I think I was in deep denial. I didn't want to face this HIV thing. Until one evening I was reading the Bible. It's like somebody shed light there. If they find you are HIV positive, your life is not in the virus, your life is in Christ," Pastor Mwaba testifies. It is from this platform that she is leading a spirited crusade in Zambia for the people to break the silence and rise above the stigma of HIV.

I meet Olayinka Jebede Ekpe from Nigeria who at only 19 and a nursing student to boot had to endure discrimination in campus dormitories and from her peers just because she had the virus.

Now widely known as the first Nigerian to speak-out publicly about her HIV status, Yinka recalls the first three days of hell after she was diagnosed HIV positive.

"I went back to bed and waited to die. I waited three days. I ate nothing. After the third day, I didn't die. I didn't believe it. I looked in the mirror, I didn't see a skeleton," Yinka says and adds: "I started searching for the truth".

The search has spanned 10 years and Yinka, now married and mother to a healthy baby is still strong on her feet. The truth that HIV and Aids is not a death sentence is what is pushing Yinka across Nigeria and beyond to urge women to "refuse to die" and move the world forward despite being HIV positive.

I meet many other women through Cedpa, like brave Jemimah Nindo Atieno from Kenya, Russell Miller Hill from the USA, Proscovia Namakula from Uganda, Irene Kapodo from Ghana, Svitlana Moroz from Ukraine and our very own Inviolata Mwali Mmbwavi from a national network that empower people living with HIV and Aids.

The tightrope

From their stories of sheer courage and determination to rise above the odds of HIV and Aids, I am humbled by the strength of these women walking the tightrope of a disease dogged by stereotype and stigma. Women are not cowing at the back of closets afraid of coming out and daring the beast head-on.

Before I left the hospital wards, I held my friend's weak hand in mine and squeezed it a little. Yes, she was right. In about a week, she will rise up and walk again. It does not matter if the week will come much later than it should have. All that matters is the soul-yanked affirmation that she will rise and walk again. Oh yes she will, just like a strong woman does. Spare a kind thought for journalists this week, won't you?

The Rwanda genocide was brought to our living rooms by journalists both local and international who opted to click their cameras rather than run for their lives.

There are countless journalists sweating it out across the world - in the Middle East, the Balkans, the underworld of South America, even in the thick forests of the Congo, at the election towers in the US, deep down in Dr Robert Mugabe's coves in Zimbabwe, at the current athlete's meeting in Addis Ababa and even though you may not know it, right next door to yours, ready to report what is important when news breaks.

When the news is bad, we recoil deeper into our seats and sympathise with tragedies far detached from the safety of our homes. But for that news to reach you, there is a reporter and a cameraman, literally living the tragedy so as to articulate the occurrence to the world.

When the news is good, we cheer and jeer, give each other pats on the back, muse over a well-done piece, criticise it or debate it, even dismiss it as shoddy or mediocre. We often do not give a thought to the challenges that journalists face in the course of putting together a report.

Camera lens

Recently, we were quick to condemn and castigate a media house that erred when hell broke loose in our backyard. True, there were low moments for the media but did you ever picture this? The eyes behind the camera lens that captured brutal killings and violent attacks were those of a human being, a mere mortal like you, only that he or she wore the hat of a journalist.

The brave faces that went on and on before cameras reliving and recounting gory scenes of violence while struggling to remain sane and focused were not lesser humans than the ordinary man. They were just people armed with a camera and a pen, offering a service without which the world would be a dark mass of information nothingness. Journalists are not super-humans. In fact if you cut journalists they do bleed and the blood is red, just like yours!

Expectations on these messengers of hope, voices for the voiceless and informers of the world are a tad bit too high sometimes. They are supposed to be witnesses to history without being involved in the unfolding scenes. It is a tough call, I tell you, and many are the times when they too become statistics in the very same corridors they serve. Ask the Reporters without Boarders. Last year alone, nine journalists were killed and more than 129 imprisoned in 99 countries while in the line of duty.

In their struggle What you may never come to know is just how many are adversely affected everyday in their struggle to bring that piece of information to you. Go on, spare a kind thought for journalists this week, no matter how skewed your perception might be towards them.