An Irish man working with HIV-positive people will travel to South Africa this month to live and work in a country where one in five adults has the virus and where about a thousand people die from Aids-related illness every day.
James O'Connor, who has been living with HIV since 1992, was one of four people chosen to travel to Africa as part of an intercultural exchange programme.
The exchange is organised by EIL Intercultural Learning, the Irish office of a worldwide organisation founded in the US in 1932 as The Experiment in International Living, a non-profit, non-religious association.
Mr O'Connor and a woman, also selected after a vigorous selection process, will travel to South Africa for eight weeks and will live in a shanty town outside Capetown. Two other people selected will go to Nigeria.
"It's a global awareness programme and volunteers focus on a theme connected with the Millennium Development Goals. I'm focusing on Goal Six, which is halting and reversing the spread of HIV by 2015," said Mr O'Connor.
He was driven by his own experience of working with HIV-positive people on a daily basis at Open Heart House, a peer support network with more than 580 members, many of them non-Irish nationals. He has also been active at national level in Ireland's HIV strategy and travelled to the UN in New York with a Government delegation in June 2006, when Taoiseach Bertie Ahern addressed a high-level meeting on Aids - the only European head of state to do so.
"In my work as development manager at Open Heart House working directly with HIV-positive people, I am meeting people who are coming from other countries and I really want to understand," Mr O'Connor said.
"While I can empathise with Irish HIV-positive people, because I do know what it feels like to have HIV, I actually really don't understand what it feels like to be South African and living in Ireland.
"At the United Nations, the morning the political declaration was signed on June 2nd, each of the ministers or presidents of each country gave a 10-minute presentation. There were 10 African presidents or prime ministers before the Irish prime minister and they were standing in the General Assembly hall literally pleading with western society to help them."
More than 5.5 million people live with HIV in South Africa and Mr O'Connor will be living and working with some of those adults and children whose lives are affected by it.
He believes his experience will give him an increased desire to challenge stigma and discrimination around HIV and Aids, an issue that is the focus of the National Stamp Out Stigma campaign to be unveiled this Friday, June 15th, Irish Aids Day.
"We do know globally stigma is one of the drivers of this epidemic," Mr O'Connor said.