AIDS meeting

There are nine mormons at breakfast – all at the table in their black suits, white shirts, ties and badges – at first I thought they were a conference of waiters – I almost asked one for coffee!
But what are they doing here? Going door to door at the home so of the Zambian upper and middle classes will be hard with all the high walls and fences. The only people to greet them with be gardeners or maids. And the poorer folks whose homes are more accessible, surely the Mormon Church won’t expect tithes – that would be 10 percent of their income! Out of the mouths of the poor!
But I watch the young men in their black suits and, even in the air-conditioned restaurant, they look sweltered. The two oldest men – Elders, I guess – have lost their jackets and look cool in short shirt sleeves. Maybe they have served their time, brought in some disciples and no longer have to suffer the heat.
I watch as an elder’s wife goes back for her third serving at the breakfast buffet – all that converting must be hungry work.
I take a taxi to the VSO office, I’d made email contact with the office before leaving home, and I’ve brought chocolates as a gift. The office is in a posher building than before, but it’s still a network of small, badly painted rooms cooled with desktop fans. But there are changes. When I was with VSO we were all young white kids with idealism but no experience. Well, today the volunteers come from Uganda, Kenya, India, Phillipines, Holland, Canada and Australia – along with a few Brits, this makes a veritable UN.
I am talking with two Indian VSO’s when a young woman from the Phillipines comes in. She complains of diarrhea and blames the drinking water. But the young Indian men tell her it isn’t the water – just Zambia belly.
The VSO office is run by Zambians who seem tuned to the country’s needs. Unlike my time when the field director was an expat wife, a Scottish teacher, who had never lived in the bush or worked in the field. A lovely guy arrived as her assistant. Paul Hitchen had spent three years in Sri Lanka as an agricuttural volunteer, but he learned about Zambia at much the same pace as we did.
Like other developing countries, Zambia has grown into a land where charities – Non Governmental Organizations – are a major employer perhaps employing more people than tourism. The charities all seem to own at least one 4x4 vehicle and a driver. I imagine that getting a foot in NGO employment door can be a great career path.
But it is also an amazing quagmire of bureaucracy that could send Kafka carazy with its alphabet soup of acronyms. A Canadian agriculturalist I meet says he could create whole sentences out of acronyms, and colleagues would know exactly what he was talking about – I wish I’d written some down.
The VSO director has arranged for me to visit some HIV projects, and I go out with an Australian volunteer who facilitates action for a number of self-help groups.
Sitting in a room full of people who are HIV positive challenges your knowledge of the disease.
It’s so easy to mock those who fear the AIDS virus – the she school board in Midwest America who sent home a child who contracted the disease through a blood transfusion, the relative who refuses to shake an AIDS sufferer’s hand. But when you yourself sit in a room, you find yourself challenged. These people harbour a deadly disease that kills more than 3 million people worldwide each year. Its minute cells seep via blood, semen, tears, breast milk and saliva to invade the next victim – could that be me? It’s totally irrational thinking, I know. I am, in reality, sitting in a room with people who have a treatable but incurable disease while they talk about petitioning the government for more help. There is no way I am in danger. But in our instinct for survival – logic isn’t always applied.
The Zambian government has begun providing free Anti-Retroviral treatment to all those testing positive for HIV. This group are all urban, professional and seeking more in support – perhaps even recognition.
The meeting breaks up and I talk to Musondah. She is a young mother who found she had the disease after her husband became sick. When he found out he was positive, she got depressed. “I told my husband ‘You got this disease, you brought it here.” But I myself was ignorant. I was very fat and thought maybe only those who are thin have the disease.”
But when her own test came back positive, Musondah knew she had much to learn. She said she was advised to eat well but wasn’t put on Anti-Retroviral treatment because her CD4 count was high.
I wonder what a CD4 count is as Musondah tells me that her son tested negative – and that was her biggest boost.
I ask about sex with her husband, and she says they know they must always use condoms or they risk reinfecting each other with differing strains of HIV.
Despite a better diet, she said she became weak and needed to begin drug therapy. Musondah is plump and has beautiful shiny skin. No one need ever know she is HIV positive. Because of the therapy, her husband is now back at work and supporting his family. “AIDS is like diabetes or TB,” she says. “You can’t cure it, but you can treat it.”
Clementine is single and older, 43. She’s a bright spark in the group – the chair who said she wants free medical care for those who are HIV positive. She was infected by an old boyfriend but only discovered she had the virus after repeated bouts of TB. “I’d been aware that a number of boyfriends had died, but love is blind – at times you forget to use condoms. Plus, you think you are in a monogamous relationship.”
Her diagnosis came before free treatment, and the cost of Anti-Retrovirals was 5million kwacha a month – more than $100 – her salary couldn’t sustain that cost. She sold a huge amount from her house until there was nothing else to sell. Her doctor told her she couldn’t stop therapy but, “I couldn’t afford it anymore.”
When the government announced free ARV therapy, she said she called up to God, “Free at last!”
But stopping the earlier therapy means she is now resistant to some of the medicines and must take a more complex, and costly, cocktail of drugs.
I ask her about dating. “I date – I go out for dinner, we drink – I want to be happy and want men to get to know me before I tell them – I want for him to say what he thinks about us before I tell him my status.” She frowns. “I’ve had two – but now they’re gone.”
I touch her arm, and she reaches out with a hug.
Guess what – I hugged back.