I read an article in the New York Times yesterday - this article, in fact - that made me gnash my teeth and want to move back to Africa. I mean, okay, yes, the last time I lived in Central Africa, c. 2005, people were dying of AIDS. I know this. But somehow I had the (apparently delusional) hope that things were getting better. I thought anti-retrovirals were, I don't know, reducing transmission rates? It was depressing to hear in the accompanying video that for every 1000 people who start anti-retrovirals, 2500 people are newly infected. That's... not good.
I made five lunches this morning, five little containers of beans and rice and cheese. I had made too much rice, and I stared at the extra rice morosely. What bothers me the most about the AIDS crisis in Central and Southern Africa, sometimes, is not that it is happening, but that we can ignore it. What bothers me is that I can waste rice here in my happy little North American life while people I met in Rwanda in 2004 could not take anti-retrovirals because they couldn't afford the food they needed to take with the pills. I find it less depressing, actually, to live in a place where people are dying of AIDS than to live here, where AIDS is invisible, and to know that I can live my merry life without ever thinking of the people living and dying across the world.
I remember, when I first moved to Rwanda, being surprised at the casual way that my educated friends and colleagues, both African and Western, spoke of being tested for HIV. "Every year," they said, even the married monogamous ones. They know too well what AIDS looks liked. They have seen friends and coworkers and neighbors die of it. Contrast: a few weeks ago, I was talking with a couple of friends about the transmission of HIV. One friend said that despite her party days in college, she has never been tested for HIV. It doesn't feel like it applies to her. Another, an over-educated lawyer like me, said that he understood that HIV could only be transmitted through blood.
Something is seriously wrong. This is someone with decades of education who does not know that HIV can be transmitted through bodily fluids other than blood (s3m3n? v@g1nal fluid? bre@st mi1k? hello? how did you think transmission was happening? it's not some stereotypical primitive blood-sharing tradition we are talking about). If my over-educated friends here don't even know how HIV is transmitted, what then do we expect in Bwindi, Uganda, where hardly anyone makes it to secondary school?
It costs $11,000 for life-long anti-retrovirals for one person in Uganda. Apparently, a life is not worth that much to us. The war on HIV/AIDS? It was the one war I thought we could win. I guess we don't care enough. It's not happening to US, right?
Eff.
I made five lunches this morning, five little containers of beans and rice and cheese. I had made too much rice, and I stared at the extra rice morosely. What bothers me the most about the AIDS crisis in Central and Southern Africa, sometimes, is not that it is happening, but that we can ignore it. What bothers me is that I can waste rice here in my happy little North American life while people I met in Rwanda in 2004 could not take anti-retrovirals because they couldn't afford the food they needed to take with the pills. I find it less depressing, actually, to live in a place where people are dying of AIDS than to live here, where AIDS is invisible, and to know that I can live my merry life without ever thinking of the people living and dying across the world.
I remember, when I first moved to Rwanda, being surprised at the casual way that my educated friends and colleagues, both African and Western, spoke of being tested for HIV. "Every year," they said, even the married monogamous ones. They know too well what AIDS looks liked. They have seen friends and coworkers and neighbors die of it. Contrast: a few weeks ago, I was talking with a couple of friends about the transmission of HIV. One friend said that despite her party days in college, she has never been tested for HIV. It doesn't feel like it applies to her. Another, an over-educated lawyer like me, said that he understood that HIV could only be transmitted through blood.
Something is seriously wrong. This is someone with decades of education who does not know that HIV can be transmitted through bodily fluids other than blood (s3m3n? v@g1nal fluid? bre@st mi1k? hello? how did you think transmission was happening? it's not some stereotypical primitive blood-sharing tradition we are talking about). If my over-educated friends here don't even know how HIV is transmitted, what then do we expect in Bwindi, Uganda, where hardly anyone makes it to secondary school?
It costs $11,000 for life-long anti-retrovirals for one person in Uganda. Apparently, a life is not worth that much to us. The war on HIV/AIDS? It was the one war I thought we could win. I guess we don't care enough. It's not happening to US, right?
Eff.
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