Mashudu Kunene, 27, from Khayelitsha township, is among the six women who will be sitting down with Laura Bush for a private discussion at a center run by the Mothers-to-Mothers-to-Be support network.

"I want the First Lady to see the reality of HIV-positive mothers and what we go through," said Kunene on the eve of her meeting with the first lady.

"The fear of death is with us all the time, we are stigmatised and not everybody has access to anti-retroviral drugs. I have a lot of things to share with her," Kunene told AFP.

After spending some private time with her twin daughters Barbara and Jenna, Laura Bush is starting off her official program by spending a day in Cape Town before traveling on to Tanzania and Rwanda to promote HIV/AIDS prevention and draw attention to the role of women in Africa.

The Mothers-to-Mothers-to-Be center in Khayelitsha, a sprawling township that is home to more than 500,000 people, offers support to between 2,500 and 3,000 HIV-positive pregnant women every month, said director Robin Smalley.

It is part of a network of 64 such centers established since 2001 after a visiting American doctor found that there was no proper support structure for HIV-positive pregnant women.

"These young women were not getting counselled. They were getting news that they were pregnant and positive and left with these terrible feelings of hopelessness and despair like they had been given a death sentence," Smalley told AFP.

The program helps educate young women about HIV "from feeding, to disclosure and dealing with stigma", said Smalley -- with a view to training them to become mentors for other HIV-positive young mothers.

Other than support, the women make beadwork that the center sells to the United States, Germany and the Netherlands, allowing the mothers to earn enough money to feed their families.

South Africa has one of the world's biggest AIDS caseloads with the UN AIDS agency estimating in 2003 that 5.3 million people were infected, or one in five adults living with the HIV virus or full-blown AIDS.

The health ministry on Monday released its latest statistics on the AIDS pandemic in the country showing that between 6.29 million and 6.57 million South Africans were living with HIV and AIDS in a country of 47 million.

Nearly 40 percent of women aged between 25 and 29 years are HIV positive while women in their early 20s and early 30s show prevalence rates of around 30 percent, according to the health ministry.

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