Our volunteers care deeply for these ostracised people and ensure that they receive the attention given to other patients,'' 'Nest' executive director Harini Amarasuriya asserts. The group is a charity that spurns four-wheel drives, the vehicle favoured by NGOs, and travels on mopeds or walks to help the forgotten and ostracised people, like AIDS infected and street children. The first case of HIV was detected in 1987. The figure has gone up to 200 officially, but off the record experts agree the more likely figure of infections would be more than 6,000. So far 60 people have died of the 75 known cases of people dying.
Heterosexual relationships are the most common route of infection.
Apart from some 12,000 commercial sex workers on the island, tens of thousands of women and men live away from their families as migrant workers abroad and in the Free Trade Zones where casual sex rates are very high. Lawyer Mallika Ganasinghe of CFPA says commercial sex workers. We select beach boys and female sex workers with leadership qualities and train them to be counsellors. These peer-educators in turn talk to others making them aware of AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases and the need to use condoms,'' she explains. She emphasises that the NGO does not ask sex workers to give up their ''work''.