Thembi Ngubane: "I said no way, this is not anonymous; this is Thembi and everyone has to hear it."

Thembi Ngubane, from Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town, South Africa, discovered she was HIV positive when she was 16 years old. Six years later, while attending a support group, she was approached by a United States-based radio producer interested in making a documentary about a year in the life of a young, HIV-positive South African. Now, Thembi is doing HIV and AIDS outreach at schools across the country and recently participated in the reality TV series, "Imagine Afrika."

"I expected [the producer] to give me a nice expensive tape recorder. He didn't - it was one of those big, old ones. I was, like, how do you actually talk to a tape recorder?

"I took it home. I was trying to record and I kept thinking, 'What am I going to say? Hi, my name is Thembi?' Ugh, that sounds so cheesy - everyone says that. I need something new, of my own ... then I took that cassette out and put another one in, and something came out, something natural.

"So that's when my diary started. I carried the tape recorder for a year and a half. Every day I was recording, mostly important stuff like visiting the clinic, disclosing [my HIV status] to my mother, talking to my boyfriend, walking around the neighbourhood to get people's views about HIV - just getting life around Khayelitsha, to take people into that situation where they are HIV positive and young and living in Khayelitsha.

"At that point I wanted to be anonymous, so that's what was agreed on. But as I actually started to record, I was getting all these negative comments about HIV. They [people] would say, 'Well, I will say something if you don't say my name.'

"It was then when I realised a lot of people were not talking about this [HIV/AIDS] and I had to push it. At that point it was fun for me because I was more comfortable talking to that tape recorder than I was talking to people. I could say anything to that tape recorder.

"When I first heard the story on National Public Radio in the US, I was, like, okay that's me there but I don't feel like I know that person. I felt like I was someone else listening to someone else's story.

"Every time I listen to it, even now, I feel like a little girl just listening to this wonderful woman telling her story, so I said: 'No way, this is not anonymous; this is Thembi and everyone has to hear it.'"

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Listen to Thembi