What's love got to do with it?

I recently have begun to realize just how deep the AIDS epidemic reaches, not in terms of who it touches or social patterns of how, but in terms of acceptance, understanding, and prevention. This is the first time since I've been here that I've known someone who has died from AIDS. One of my water project technicians died just about two weeks ago. I knew for a long time, since, specifically, he was forced to stop working, that he was sick. My supervisor, a very educated, wordly man who has worked with PCVs for many years broke the news to me that he couldn't continue the work, which was ok since it was mostly finished. All I was told was that, "Il est gravement malade est il se soin a Mbalmayo." "He is REALLY sick and he is getting treatment in Mbalmayo," a city know for its hospitals and missonary influence.

Everytime I would ask how he is doing, it was the same answer, and I have asked before what is his illness, though never to receive an answer. He was always really nice and very hardworking and young-maybe 30ish. When the villagers were too lazy to turn the cement, he got out there and turned it with his shovel carefully placed on his knee. About a month after starting the work in April (the effects of hard physical labor is something I can't help but wonder about), he was sent to the hospital never to return to his home village. I am greatful he was chosen to work on the project because we were able to pay him good money for his work, and was probably less of a financial burden on his family.

But all this while I kept hearing how sick he is. Of course my mind thought, "Well maybe it's AIDS..." But that is a conclusion you want someone else to draw for you, not one you draw for yourself. Just a few days ago, my supervisor broke to me the news that he died after his long fight, which was the fact that he would bleed when he pooped (I'm not a doctor...) impounded by the fact that he was seropositive. I wondered for a long time why he couldn't just come right out and tell me that he had AIDS. And I honestly believe that while sometimes up to 20% of the population has HIV/AIDS, people still don't believe in it 100% of the time. This was highlighted by a comment my supervisor made a few minutes later. "Oh, you know, there's all that sorcery in village. They thought maybe he would get better once he left the village." This statement came from an educated man about a young man who was on the skinny side and who turned cement for a living. How can anyone in this day and age possibly think that sorcery was what did him in?

No one talks about it. Sometimes people will drop hints like, "Oh, she's not serious." Or, "He's sick." But people make all efforts to avoid identifying what is not ok, which, to me, keeps HIV/AIDS mysterious and silences the voices of people living with HIV. Why is it not ok to talk about it? Why are some afraid to tell their sexual partners, or do some do it maliciously?

In addition, HIV does, generally speaking, have a face. Here, it is often the slightly older, well paid men with good jobs, "sugar daddies" as they are very accurately named, who sleep with very young, very attractive women and girls, sometimes as young as 12 or 13. The price? In the South, it is often nothing more than a beer (1 dollar)or free rides in Mercedes-Benz's. I was once told a story by another PCV who was at the bar with a forester who called an attractive, random young woman off the street to give him a blow job right there in front of his friends at the bar to show off his power in front of everyone. If you're a younger guy with HIV, you might be a mototaximan, and you come pick up your "friends" to bring them to school in the morning are return them in the evening after you've gone out. In this case, they're not rich, but they're young, often from out of town, and have very few expenses.

And condom use? This is generally stigmatized, though slowly becoming more acceptable in certain urban areas. Young women in my part of Cameroon might not necessarily feel like they have the power to demand the use of one, and other women and men say many a thing about their use (although much more bogus than the commonly heard American teenager saying "It's not comfortable."). Women, espeically married women, don't have the right to ask for one in many cases, even if they know their husbands are sleeping with other women. She is, essentially, paid for. I heard a case of a back-alley abortion doctor in another region of the country who is HIV positive, and accepts payment only in the form of unprotected sex (here abortion is illegal).

PCVs are effectively living in another world, trying to start that conversation that took America herself many years to start. While I don't think everyone who has HIV needs to share this information with the world, they need to be ok sharing it with their loved ones, their partners, and close friends. And sorcery is not the cause. Unprotected sex is. I get lost whenever my friends talk about sorcery. I even once told someone that if you don't believe in it, it can't affect you. They could not even understand the analogy that if you don't believe in God, he can't send you to hell (a Jehova's Witness, clearly). So even when my supervisor brought sorcery into this young man's death, I was speechless. I didn't know what to say, but I probably should have created the room for this young man's voice by saying something to make it real. Silence can only perpetuate the disease.