Living for Disco

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how I’m going to adjust to life back at home in the UK when my time here is done. Public transport, for one thing, will be interesting. I haven’t been on a bus or a train for ten months. Also, I think I will be aghast at how expensive everything is. N$30 for a cup of coffee!

One of the main things, though, is how I’m going to adjust to a country where HIV is a minor consideration for most people. Quite recently, one of our staff members had the opportunity to go to the Netherlands for a conference. Apart from the fact that it has completely changed his outlook on what he wants to do with his life, and his opportunities, he said that it made him realize what a major problem Namibia has with HIV. By being in a country where it is not on billboards and TV, and where people are largely oblivious to it, his awareness of the magnitude of Namibia’s infection rate has been hightened.

The official statistics for HIV here are truly shocking. One in five people nationally live with HIV and AIDS, and the numbers aren’t changing. In some areas, almost half of all pregnant women test positive. Nobody knows how many children here have been orphaned by the disease, but it’s estimated that one in every eight children here are AIDS orphans.

HIV is everywhere – you cannot get away from it. In every school, in every government building, in every office you see posters and information leaflets. At almost every night out I have ever had the conversation comes back to HIV and the work being done. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t seem to matter how many posters and leaflets and workshops and radio programmes go out about it, or how much it is talked about - people are not changing their behaviour.

Namibia has a large mobile community – jobs are scarce and people need to move around a lot to make money. This means that men and women have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives and husbands in various areas of the country. Men and women still take multiple sexual partners. Many men do not wear condoms, and women have little choice but to comply in many case.  With transactional sex a large number of men are willing to pay much more money for sex without a condom.

USAID’s oblique refusal to fund organizations that deal with condom promotion or sex workers dangerously ignores two important areas of HIV prevention and mitigation. That incenses me. How many of the many men who make these decisions pay for blowjobs in their ivory towers?

Young people are the worst affected. I heard through a colleague about a group schoolgirls in a town north west of Windhoek that decided to go and get tested together at the end of last year. Half of them were positive.

Despite the dire situation, for people here this state of affairs is normal. Despite the stigma still attached to it, AIDS is part of every day life for everyone in this country. And while I absolutely believe that the stigma surrounding the disease has to be demolished, both for the sake of those affected, and for understanding about the disease in general, I often wonder whether by removing the stigma, you also remove the fear. Not that the fear seems to make people behave differently, and in any case, fear is especially dangerous where knowledge is limited.

I suppose that in an ideal world, everyone would understand how HIV is transmitted and how it can be avoided, and in that case there would be neither stigma, nor misunderstanding. Unfortunately, this is not an ideal world, and mixed messages are rife.

I remember once in a school drama show a while ago, a small kid came up to me after the show and asked me whether HIV could be transmitted by sharing knives and forks. I said that no, it could not.

“But,” he said, “What if someone has a sore in their mouth, and they use the fork, and then you use it, and you have a cut?”

Staggered by the question, and unwilling to get into a discussion about viral load in various bodily fluids with a ten year old second language English-speaker, I explained that the virus doesn’t live outside the human body for more than a few minutes, and in any case, the amount of fluid you’d need to exchange would be quite large, so it’s extremely unlikely, but that for hygiene’s sake, you should always wash cutlery before sharing it. He persisted, asking me more and more complex questions, all trying to get me to give him the answer that he clearly believed was the truth. And in the end, to the believer, what is the difference between belief and knowledge?

There are so many myths and half-truths surrounding HIV. Many people believe that ARVs represent a cure. An astounding number believe it is the result of, or can be cured by witchcraft. Child rape is not unknown here, because some men believe that if they sleep with a child, or a virgin, they will be cured.

As for myself, whereas before I came here I was well aware of AIDS, now I’m not complacent. Despite some incautious sexual behaviour of my own in the past, I would now not even consider sleeping with someone new without a condom - and I’m highly aware of how lucky I am to be in a position to insist. I would without hesitation go for an HIV test, and ask my partner to do so, before I considered unprotected sex. And yet, so much still hangs on trust – how do you know that your partner will be faithful to you?

So for me, going back to a country where this is not an every day topic of conversation, where a significant proportion of the workforce is not sick, or dying, or does not have to tend to family members who are sick, or dying, and where abstain is not a word in most school kids’ sexual vocabulary will be quite an adjustment.