Re: AIDS/Africa

The horrific spread of aids in Africa has led some to call it “the orphaned continent.” South Africa alone has six million infected men, women, and children, with invisible millions already buried. Surrounded by South Africa, landlocked physically and spiritually, sits the small state of Lesotho, where, in December 2004, Canadian doctor Philip Berger arrived for World aids Day. At the behest of United Nations Special Envoy for hiv/ aids in Africa Stephen Lewis, and as part of a special program established by the Ontario Hospital Association, Berger spent seven months in Lesotho at an aids clinic. By his own account, Lesotho—population 1.9 million; 300,000 adults and 20,000 children infected with the aids virus; 29,000 aids-related deaths per year—is dying. Short on medicine and staff, Berger persevered as best he could, and at night sent emails home. The following text is a small sampling.

December 1, 2004

Hello everybody.

I apologize for a ghastly mass communication but life is very complicated in Lesotho and efficiency in email contact is paramount. Nonetheless my email problems are trivial next to the devastation endured by the Basotho, the people living in Lesotho. Lesotho has an hiv prevalence rate among adults of almost 30 percent. One hundred thousand children have lost at least one parent to aids. One of the hiv counsellors at the Motebang Hospital where I will be working knows of no family that has been spared an aids death. The Motebang hiv clinic is called Tsepong Clinic, which translates as “Place of Hope.”

December 4, 2004

Yesterday we visited the Senkatana Centre, an antiretroviral hiv/aids clinic that opened in May 2004. The name Senkatana derives from a Lesotho legend. Some time ago a terrible monster devoured all the people and animals of Lesotho except for a lone pregnant woman who eventually gave birth to a boy named Senkatana. When he grew older Senkatana asked his mother why there were no people in Lesotho and she told him the story of the monster. So Senkatana armed himself with a spear and slayed the dragon, freeing all the people and animals of Lesotho. Here, hiv is the monster and the clinic is Senkatana.

December 12, 2004

It’s six o’clock on Friday night, December 10—International Human Rights Day. A Motebang Hospital pharmacist just left our home. She came here especially to inform us that there was no infant antiretroviral syrup available or obtainable for a four-month-old girl who we admitted the day before. The girl weighed three kilograms, her eyelids weighed down by exhaustion, starvation, and dehydration, both elbows flexed and held tightly to her sides, fists in an atavistic clench, legs not moving, thigh skin sagging and geriatric. A local aids MD exclaimed that, “This little thing is not enjoying life at all.” The infant girl is so dry that no veins are accessible so the doctor inserts a needle into the child’s groin, apologizing as she plunges it in. The girl speaks for the first time, letting out a hoarse, frail, failed whimpering wail, not the piercing cry of a healthy child.

I am weary and it is late. Of the thirty people we have seen [today] twenty-six were women and children. Staff here dread the Xmas season when male migrant mine-workers return home to their already infected wives and reinfect them, the wives defenceless, terrified of disclosing their condition until the wasting does it for them.

December 22, 2004