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"No other place on earth has been as devastated
by the AIDS virus as southern Africa. This is
the story of what happens when a disease infects
not just individuals but entire
societies-swallowing families, communities and
hopes, and raising the question of whether the rest
of the world's reluctance to do more against this
modern curse amounts to an enormous crime against
humanity.
"So far, 17 million Africans have died of AIDS,
more than 3.7 million of them children and 12
million additional children have been orphaned by
AIDS. An estimated 8.8% of adults in Africa are
infected with HIV/AIDS, and in seven countries, at
least 1 adult in 5 is living with
HIV: Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho,
Zambia, South Africa and Namibia. . At least 25
million may follow. And, this may be low since
there is no broad-scale AIDS testing: infection
rates are calculated mainly from the presence of
HIV in pregnant women. Death certificates in these
countries do not record AIDS as the cause. "
Time magazine's 2/12/01 issue makes a twenty
page intimate look at this modern curse.
"Death stalks a continent. In the dry timber of
African societies, AIDS was a spark. The
conflagration it set off continues to kill
millions.
"Imagine your life this way. You get up in the
morning and breakfast with your three kids. One is
already doomed to die in infancy. You risk your
life in every act of sexual intercourse. You go to
work past a house where a teenager lives alone
tending young siblings without any source of
income. At another house, the wife was branded a
whore when she asked her husband to use a condom,
beaten silly and thrown into the streets. Over
there lies a man desperately sick without access to
a doctor or clinic or medicine or food or blankets
or even a kind word. At work you eat with
colleagues, and every third one is already fatally
ill. You whisper about a friend who admitted she
had the plague and whose neighbors stoned her to
death. Your leisure is occupied by the funerals you
attend every Saturday. You go to bed fearing adults
your age will not live into their 40s. You and your
neighbors and your political and popular leaders
act as if nothing is happening."
"As the HIV virus sweeps mercilessly through
these lands, a few try to address the terrible
depredation. The rest of society looks away. Flesh
and muscle melt from the bones of the sick in
packed hospital wards and lonely bush kraals.
Corpses stack up in morgues until those on top
crush the identity from the faces underneath. Raw
earth mounds scar the landscape, grave after grave
without name or number. Bereft children grieve for
parents lost in their prime, for siblings scattered
to the winds.
The victims don't cry out. Doctors and
obituaries do not give the killer its name.
Families recoil in shame. Leaders shirk
responsibility. The stubborn silence heralds
victory for the disease: denial cannot keep the
virus at bay.
"The developed world is largely silent too.
AIDS in African has never commanded the
full-bore response the West has brought to other,
sometimes lesser, travails. We pay sporadic
attention, turning on the spotlight when an
international conference occurs, then turning it
off. Goodhearted donors donate; governments
acknowledge that more needs to be done. But think
how different the effort would be if what is
happening here were happening in the West.
"The deep silence that makes African leaders and
societies want to deny the problem, the corruption
and incompetence that render them helpless is
something the West cannot fix. But the fact that
they are poor is not. The wealthy world must help
with its zeal and its cash if southern Africa is
ever to be freed of the AIDS plague."
And, until their children are safe, our children
are not.
Source: Time magazine,
2/12/01
* * *
Stealing the lives of our friends and our loved
ones, AIDS steals our dialogue, or poisons it
with inhibited self-consciousness. - Michael
Feingold
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