Naming Death A-I-D-S :: AIDS

Naming Death    I was visiting a doctor in Kwazulu-Natal, the province hardest hit by AIDS, to see for myself the impact of AIDS in the region. The doctor was just finishing up with an elderly patient from a village. After I introduced myself and stated the purpose of my visit, she immediately leaned towards the woman and demanded, "Tell her, just tell her how many young people you've buried this week."    The elderly woman softly replied, "Five funerals this Saturday. Every week about five or six."    "We've been told that one in eight South Africans are estimated to be HIV-positive," I said.    "My dear," the doctor matter-of-factly replied, "it's not one in eight here; 95 percent of the people I see are HIV positive."    95% ! I want you to close your eyes and imagine all of your friends and family - the people nearest and dearest to you. Now, I want you to imagine 95% of them gone.    This is what HIV does, this is what it is doing in South Africa and other parts of the world. What we saw there is a veritable genocide.    Before our trip, all of us read the statistics and in some way thought we understood the magnitude of AIDS epidemic, but you understand it only when you realize there is a human face behind every statistic. When throughout the country it is estimated that 1 in 8 people are HIV positive, do we really think that this battle can be won by multivitamins and condoms?    Yet, this is what I saw over and over again throughout Cape Town and other parts of the country. "These people are living in poverty," health care workers told me. "They can't get jobs. They can't even afford proper food, forget about drugs." The same doctor who told me that 95% of the patients are HIV positive lamented that the only treatment she can offer is multivitamins and one antibiotic!!!    How do we expect the younger generations to hope for a brighter future in this environment? I was told that many South African young people have a fatalistic, "I'm-going-to-die-anyway" attitude. How do you convince them to practice safe-sex? Or that their lives are worth living? There's a stigma attached to being HIV positive (we know that in this country as well).