Infected

Msoya Magombo, a 30-year-old father of three has been sick for a year. His little thatched-roof, mud-brick cottage in the village of Mamwera, near Zomba in Malawi, is dark at mid-day and full of a fear-inducing smell which seeps from cauliflower-sized growths spreading from his arm pits out onto his chest. Kaposi’s Sarcoma is a rare form of cancer, except among AIDS patients. The nurses I accompany on the visit to Magombo are just as worried that he seems to be showing the first signs of dementia.

Affected

Mary Agnes Raphael is a home care volunteer who takes care of eight AIDS patients in her neighbourhood in Lilongwe, Malawi. She’s been spending her weekends and evenings helping people who face death for three years. Four of her patients have died this year, and though it’s inevitable she takes the deaths hard. She spends her own money on food when her patients have none. She pays bus fares when her patients need to get to the hospital. It’s tough on a housekeeper’s salary. “I like to help some people,” she explains. Raphael believes everyone should know their HIV status. She tested negative last year.Affected
Magombo’s wife Aida has been farming and raising the children and caring for her sick husband virtually alone this last year. “The man is the man. There are some things I cannot manage to do,” she says. She and the children have often gone hungry. Though her husband was certainly HIV positive for years before he began to fall ill, Aida remains healthy. She hasn’t been tested, though she says she is ready to attend a voluntary counselling and testing site. It would take her all day to walk from the village into town to be tested.

Infected

Amal was smuggled out of rural Ethiopia, where HIV-positive children are often abandoned or even killed. She now lives in Nyumbani, a Catholic orphanage exclusively for HIV-positive children in Kenya. With the help of anti-retrovirals, her health is good.

Affected

Maureen Khakayi and Felisters Dimmina are in Form 2 and 3 (Grade 10 and 11) of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Secondary School. Maureen wants to be a surgeon and Felisters dreams of going to university to study business. This would be quite ordinary if it weren’t that these teenaged orphans are living together in a three-metre square mud and galvanized steel room with no electricity, sleeping on a mattress on a mud floor, studying by the light of a tiny tin kerosene lamp in the middle of Kibera, one of the poorest, most violent and biggest slums in all Africa. The sewage runs in open ditches, snaking past mud houses all along the girls’ route to and from school. The last family Maureen stayed with was her uncle, but when he had to take in the younger orphans of another relative who had died of AIDS, Maureen became unwelcome. “I was just like a burden to him.”

Infected

Douglas Yungo has known he is positive for five years. His CD4 count is up to 320, from 139 two years ago. He has been on ARVs for two years, and the 38-year-old believes he may live to see 50. He makes his living selling soap and shampoo around Kibera, which isn’t much of an income. The widower finds it difficult to afford the quality foods which provide necessary nutritional support for his ARV treatment. Despite this, he has taken in two neighbourhood orphans, hoping to guide them through high school. That’s two high school boys in addition to his own three children. Knowing you are positive is the beginning of accepting yourself and taking responsibility for your life, said Yungo.

Infected and Affected

Dolline Anyango (left) is 32 with four children and she has known she is positive for two-and-a-half years. “The first thing I thought was the children.” She spent days inside her room in Kibera crying, fearful that people might look at her and know. Though some believe the stigma associated with AIDS is diminishing, Anyango’s neighbours have refused to allow their children to play with hers and have protested when she hung her clothes on the same line as theirs. Anyango is maintaining her health with a good diet. She’s not on ARVs.  Meline Marion Calisto (right) is the youngest of Anyango’s children. In theory, Anyango believes everyone should know their HIV status, but she can’t bear the thought her baby might be positive. Meline has not been tested.

Infected

Lydia Kathebwe has been vomiting and she has felt a swelling in her face for some time. Her husband is in Luanda, Angola, where he has another wife. She doesn’t expect to see him again, and at 31 she worries most about what will happen to her four children when she’s gone.

Affected

Br. Alain Ragueneau counsels people before and after they are tested for HIV. He has been a missionary 30 years, and when he started he believed that as colonialism faded so would Africa’s poverty. Having moved from the village to the urban slums, the Belgian has seen the people’s poverty deepen. He has seen the central pillar of African society, the family, disintegrate. “Never have I seen people so alone,” he said.

Infected

Florence Adhiambo has known she was positive for four years. It was only after her husband died that she was tested. Though people are packed into Kibera slum almost on top of one another, the 40-year-old mother of three finds life lonely. She stays in the city so she can continue to receive ARVs.

Affected

Marita Kathebwe is 15 and would like to go back to school where she loved studying English, math, social studies and agriculture. But her mother’s too sick and her grandmother is too old to care for her two younger brothers and her 12-year-old sister.