InterPress News Service (IPS) - Thursday, March 26, 1998
Remi Oyo

The person at the heart of the campaign is medical doctor Leonie McSweeney, a nun who has been visiting Catholic churches with a simple message: AIDS (the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) kills but can be conquered through behavioural change.

McSweeney, already widely known for her television series here on a method of regulating births that is accepted by the Catholic church, tells her audiences in the churches she visits that the main aim of the anti-AIDS campaign ''is to help youths and married people either to change behaviour or maintain healthy behaviour in order to avoid AIDS''.

The programme tagged ''The True Love Wins Campaign'', is being conducted under the auspices of a Catholic NGO - the Pro-Family Life Association of Nigeria (PLAN).

According to a document made available to IPS, the True Love Wins Campaign hopes to assist in ''changing dangerous habits like watching pornographic films, videos and taking addictive drugs which often result in AIDS''.

''The campaign also includes changing the attitude of many healthy people towards those who are infected with HIV,'' the document said.

The family is the main focus, according to McSweeney, who believes a ''blend of science, medicine and prayers can achieve the basis of stable family life''. She told IPS in Ibadan, 120km north of here, that the campaign pursues its objectives at the group and individual levels.

A short 15-minute lecture during Sunday mass is usually followed by a three-hour interactive lecture during which the plan of action of the campaign is introduced.

Coordinators of the campaign hope this plan of action will be replicated in each group formed as a result of interest generated by the McSweeney lectures and the training of volunteers at the PLAN headquarters in Ibadan.

Volunteers pay a small fee -- as little as 48 U.S. cents -- for a seven-week programme although they are required to pay for resource materials such as books, and audio and video cassettes produced in the three main Nigerian languages of Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba as well as in Pidgin English.

''At the first session, correct scientific, medical and statistical information is given, according to the group's need and background,'' explains a leaflet sold along with commitment cards at six US cents each.

The four-page cards come in two colours: yellow for the single youths and blue for the married ones.

''Believing that True Love wins and relying on the grace of God, I make a commitment to Him, to myself, my spouse and my children and my friends, to be absolutely faithful for the rest of my life,'' reads the front page of a small blue commitment card.

The commitments are expected to be sent to any of the PLAN offices nationwide. McSweeney confirmed that hundreds have already been received. The cards also contain prayers and verses from the Bible and the Koran on the virtues of chastity.

According to the accompanying leaflet, the True Love Wins Campaign in Nigeria ''was begun because of the growing concern that if we do not take difficult steps immediately, AIDS could ruin our country within the next decade''.

Current statistical information puts the number of people infected with HIV in Nigeria at between three million and five million out of a population of 119 million. Of particular concern, says McSweeney in her latest book 'A challenge to love', are the statistics which put the national average for infected pregnant women at two percent.

''In the worst hit city, six out of every hundred women attending antenatal clinics were infected. To these figures must be added their male partners and some of their children,'' McSweeney wrote in her 129-page book.

In April 1995, ''I learned that in one large hospital, the number of prospective blood donors, usually relatives of patients whose blood test showed infection with the AIDS virus, was between two and three percent in 1994. By January 1996, this rate had risen to seven percent'', McSweeney wrote.

Aided by powerful images of a trip she paid to Uganda, McSweeney draws from the experiences of people living with AIDS in East Africa, particularly Uganda, and discusses the prevention of the dreaded disease and and care for people afflicted by it.

In Nigeria, PLAN has set aside March 25 or any day close to it for the marking of the True Love Wins Day at which workshops and symposia are expected to be held to sensitise the public on the need to curtail the spread of AIDS. So far, McSweeney and her team have spread the word to 11 of Nigeria's 36 states, IPS was told.

The Campaign, according to McSweeney's book, was inspired by the spread worldwide of the True Love Waits Campaign begun in 1993 by a Baptist Sunday School Board in Tennesse, U.S., and which preaches sexual abstinence among youths.

The Campaign has been replicated in several other countries including, Malawi, Canada, Uganda, Kenya and New Zealand. (end/ips/ro/kb/98)

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