"We do not get used to the misery or the loss of sick people. The only way to react is to fight,”, declares Hakima Himmich, displaying a bobbed hairstyle and having a sturdy character, whose energy is visible at first glance. 
When the pioneer of the fight against AIDS in Morocco evokes her years of militancy in the National Union of Students of Morocco in Paris, the initial impression is confirmed. This doctor and teacher at the Casablanca Medical School is an early activist in the fight against AIDS: "The emergence of the disease in the 1980s gave a totally new turn to my career. I have devoted myself entirely to this cause. In 1988, this infectious disease specialist 
and former intern of the Paris Hospitals founded and chaired the AIDS control Association. The goals are numerous, from prevention to screening, and from access to care or psychosocial care: "We fight on all fronts and the sick patients die much less”, she says. When Hakima Himmich was a child, she already knew what she wanted to become and that working was "the means to become self-sufficient and to achieve equality." As the first person in the family to get her junior high school degree, she chose - with the complicity of her father, a noble profession that requires a commitment – to study medicine. While she was exercising her profession in "the most beautiful hospital in France, the Henri-Mondor hospital in Créteil", Hakima decided to return to Morocco carried by an ideal: "I wanted to be useful to my country”, she says. Her involvement, which did not weaken in more than forty years, resulted in the awarding to this wife and mother of two boys, a Wissam (royal decoration) in Morocco and the Legion of Honor in France. Since 2013, this tireless worker is president of “Coalition PLUS”, an international union of twelve major AIDS control organizations from five continents. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Mohammed V Foundation for Solidarity.