PrEP a Day saves LIFE

30 year old Beatrice Kerubo sat up on the edge of the bed as she tried to recount the events of
the previous night in the company of a client well known to her. She must have been too drunk
to think about insisting on protected sex. She looked at the Ks. 15,000 that had been left on the
dressing table and thought about what her life and that of her daughter would have been if she
had not taken her daily pill of Pre Exposure Prophilaxis (PrEP).
Beatrice is an Outreach Worker with the IRDO’s Jilinde program in Kisii and has been on PrEP
since October 2017. To her, the daily pill is a life saving dose that she would never give up for
anything, at least, while she still gets her money from Female Sex Work (FSW).
Beatrice was enrolled into the Jilinde program in 2013 by a Peer Educator while at one of the
hotspots in Kisii town. Then they were only given other services like condom distribution and
health talks because PrEP had not been introduced. When PrEP was introduced in 2017, she
agreed to take it up and has never looked back.
She would soon be named a Jilinde PrEP Ambassador and was charged with the responsibility of
reaching out to her colleagues. Her duty would be to provide education on the effects and
benefits of the pill to her many colleagues who were at a very high risk of contracting HIV due to
their obvious vulnerability.
“Apart from the hectic nature of having to swallow a pill daily whether you are going to have sex
or not, the good side of PrEP far much outweighs its bad side” She said. To help her walk this
journey, Beatrice has a PrEP buddy with whom they remind and encourage one another when
the time comes for the pill.
An Outreach Worker by day and an FSW by night, Beatrice supervises 14 Peer Educators; a team
that is in charge of going to the FSW hotspots educating their peers on PrEP, safe sex, condom
distribution and general safety tips as they go about their business.
She says PrEP uptake under the Jilinde program is very high and most of the FSW are very
positive about it because it literally saves lives. Many of the FSWs have one time or another been
involved in scary experiences of clients either refusing to use protection or they get intoxicated
to levels that their judgment is blurred. “Some clients also insist on paying more just so that they
can have raw sex.” She added.
Beatrice believes that a better regimen for PrEP that would allow for an injection or a one off pill
will turn around the entire intervention.

“We still experience pockets of stigma from certain quarters. Some people cannot make the
difference between ARVs and PrEP since their containers look alike! To such people, anything in
such a container only means one thing: HIV positive”