I’ve been holding this post off for a long time, wanting to find the right words that could sum everything up.
It’s funny how sometimes one sentence can be the trigger, and other times those same words can flicker by like the rest.
For me it was the opening line of Stephanie Nolen’s book – a collection of stories from her years spent as a correspondent for the Globe and Mail in Africa that really puts a face on the complex medical, political and economic crisis of the AIDS pandemic – that I had read this fall, but picked up again recently.
“I looked at AIDS in Africa for a long time before I understood what I was seeing.”
About a month ago I got word that Veneranda had passed away. Ven was 16 when I met her this summer, PIUMA’s youngest member. Our encounter had been brief, but her image stayed with me. She was laughing with a bunch of friends on the way to school, her sweater the royal blue of secondary. She greeted us, Izack and I, energetic and friendly, but her eyes bore a seriousness alien to her manner and the clatter of her friends.
After exchanging hilarious and pathetic attempts to understand each other’s language, she pulled Izack aside and told him that she had not been feeling well. If I knew then what I know now, I would have understood; her HIV infection had progressed to its final stage - AIDS. With all I had heard about the successes of medication, I thought it was just a bump on her rocky journey.
A little after I got the news, I saw a doctor here, who reported the first case of AIDS in Quebec in 1982. I told him about PIUMA and about Ven, and I asked him about the effectiveness of treatment. What he told me surprised me: with close monitoring and a pill once a day, patients can live “forever.” AIDS has become a chronic illness here.
Furious about the situation, I wanted to find someone to blame. I imagined that smug District Medical Officer clutching his budget book tight and fumbling with questions I should have asked him: why is there no functioning CD4 machine in the entire region to monitor the progression of HIV in patients? Why do you give out expired meds? Why are you not doing more to test and inform? Why are people dying?
I also began to see that the victims are more than those directly affected. HIV permeates every corner of society, as does the corruption that accompanies its treatment.
On one of my last days in Bulongwa, I met an extraordinary man. Mzee Obadia, now in his seventies, was there when the Lutheran Hospital was built around the time of independence. As an administrator of the hospital, he oversaw the planting and management of a massive pine forest that he envisioned to solve some of the financial constraints of hospital patients. If ever someone couldn’t afford treatment, they would be able to work in the forest, planting or cutting, once their health had returned.
We met in his home – a one-room mud-and-brick with a thatched roof. The smoke burnt my eyes as I sat with him around the fire in the darkness of his house that afternoon. He had wanted to offer me tea, but could no longer afford it. This was his fate; the pine forest that would serve patients and pay his pension was now all but gone, siphoned off by the doctors and administrators who had replaced him, used to buy themselves cars and clothes and nicer homes. So we drank boiled water and shared stories into the night.
Beyond all the darkness, there is tremendous warmth. The vibrancy, the friendliness, the hospitality, the continued hard work, is actually what you notice first. So much so that it is easy to overlook the suffering.
And that is the real tragedy. That the people affected are people, with all the ups and downs of life, and that do not define themselves by their economic or medical situation. They are not the tokens of poverty in Christian Children’s Fund commercials, perpetually staring blankly and waiting to be saved. They are real people, doing their best to get by and have fun.
In one of my first walks out to a more isolated village to meet members, one of them turned to me. He said, “It’s funny. A long time ago, if you walked through here, my ancestors might have killed you.” He then took my pen and notebook, and he marked down his email address.
The world has changed. It is time to demand that our friends and neighbors receive the same rights we enjoy.
