Couple battles AIDS with love

Vadodara:
Love can work miracles. Yes, it may sound like one fat cliche, but for many it has turned their worlds around and given them a chance at a second life.

Rakhi has been living with AIDS for the last seven years but is far from pessimistic as her husband, who is not HIV positive, helps her deal with her reality. She in turn lends a helping hand to hundreds though her organisation that works with HIV/ AIDS patients.

For twenty-eight year old Rakhi Patel, life was never been so beautiful, even though she is living with AIDS.

Diagnosed as HIV positive seven years ago, Rakhi has now started a new life, helping HIV/AIDS patients in the centre that she set up in Vadodara, along with her husband Dinesh. Dinesh doesn't have AIDS but he says love is enough to keep him with Rakhi.

",When you love someone, you just don't need to see any other thing, even if it's AIDS. My idea is to keep her happy, continue her treatment so that she can live longer and love can do such miracles,", said Dinesh.

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Rakhi was married once before in 1999 and soon after she realised that her husband was HIV positive. After he died of AIDS, Rakhi was thrown out of her husband's home. She returned home to her mother and set up this organization, AP Positive, to help people like her. And this is how she met her future husband.

",I never thought before Dinesh proposed me that an AIDS patient can get married with a person who is not carrying that deadly virus. I have now started working for other such patients like me and we hope to find more and more people like Dinesh. It's just some human touches, behaviour which, AIDS patients like me want, just some love,", said Rakhi Patel.

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",Had there been more such people the world would have been a better place to live,", said Ratan Shah, NGO activist.

Rakhi and Dinesh perhaps can be the face of government's campaign to rehabilitate HIV positive people in the society. Rakhi wants the story of her marriage to be told so that it can inspire millions of others fighting the deadly virus.