The dreadlocked 26-year-old, a reformed thief and onetime drug peddler, Hood Katende is now an anti-AIDS activist respected in his Kampala slum. He urges young men to wear condoms if they can't avoid premarital sex and encourages teenage girls to reject the sexual advances of older men with money, AP reported. "At night you find boys waiting for girls to rape, and I go to them and I try to talk to them not to do it," he said. "I used to be with them, smoking weed the whole day in the ghetto and moving around at night. I was a member of a gang, but now they see that I have changed day and night." As World AIDS Day is marked Monday, Katende is trying to stem a troubling resurgence in Uganda of HIV, which now infects more than 500 young women between the ages of 15 and 24 each week, according to the Uganda AIDS Commission. Between 2007 and 2013 the number of Ugandans infected with HIV rose from 1.2 million to 1.6 million, according to Uganda's Ministry of Health. -- SPA 19:48 LOCAL TIME 16:48 GMT تغريد
