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Diesel, Oil and Condoms
Now Volunteers Teach Safe Sex to Truckers
Stop reading for a moment. Visualize the last look of contempt you gave someone different from you. Now imagine that same person saving the life of your father, your brother, your husband. This happens every day on Indian roads, where transgender sex workers are the last line of defense against HIV.
In the darkness of these roads, among dusty trucks and broken dreams, these people transform discrimination into salvation. A brutal lesson about how life has peculiar ways of teaching us humility.
How many times have you turned away when passing someone you considered “different”? Indian truckers did the same. Until they realized these same people were the only ones capable of explaining, without sugarcoating, why their beliefs about miracle cures were killing them.
1.48% of them have HIV — seven times higher than the national average. Numbers that could be even worse without this unexpected intervention. Between honking horns and roaring engines, these “unlikely educators” fight deadly myths with raw truths. Road reality doesn’t allow for half-truths or empty moralizing.
Think about it: who better to talk about survival than those who fight to survive every day? Ruby and Bhavna didn’t learn about HIV in universities. They learned on the…
