Kidlington Visit to South Africa, 2007

In Africa, you don’t die of AIDS: you still die, but in explanation, they will say that you “got sick”. If a woman discloses to her husband that she is HIV positive, he may beat her and throw her out, even if it was he who infected her. Although drugs are available to pregnant women who have tested HIV positive that prevent them passing the virus to their child, many do not return to the clinic for their test results.

Such is the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS in South Africa. From a previous visit to Montshiwa in 2005, it was evident that HIV/AIDS was doing enormous damage, that this was compounded by stigma, and that the link church did not feel comfortable taking leadership. There did not appear to be a coordinated programme in the parish, and as this includes some 30 outstations, many remote and with poor infrastructure, the very idea of coordination was questionable.

Kathryn Ellis, Hilary Campbell and I travelled out in March 2007 with the specific aim of exploring, and facilitating discussion on, the issues surrounding HIV/AIDS. What programmes already existed that might work for Montshiwa? What resources were out there in the community – people with key roles and expertise who could work together to set things in motion? We sensed that the pieces of the jigsaw were already there: they just need piecing together.

Our first week was spent visiting projects in Johannesburg and Soweto. These included Themba, a travelling youth theatre; Tsa-Botsogo, the community care centre founded by Masi Cowper (who spoke at St Mary’s earlier this year); Rainbow Village AIDS Hospice; and an orphanage for abused and abandoned children, some of whom are also living with HIV.

Moving to Montshiwa for our second week, we visited medical facilities, schools and outstations. At Molemo Memorial Primary School, the children performed readings and drama based on the book “You, Me & HIV”. Kidlington had placed these books in the school in 2005. At another school, we heard the key messages of safer sex, condoms and “a friend with AIDS is still your friend” from children as young as six or seven. Yet among adults, stigma still casts a shadow of silence.

We had travelled out with a set of fifteen puppets, made by the ladies of Kidlington and Hampton Poyle. With illiteracy rates around 30 percent, Kathryn had conceived of puppet theatre as an educational tool to convey the facts of transmission and prevention to non-readers. We quickly saw that the puppets had a wider potential – in helping people to talk more naturally and openly. By putting your fears and feelings into the mouth of a puppet, it becomes easier to externalise them.

AIDS in Africa is a problem of such magnitude that it is at once shocking and no longer shocking: it becomes a fact of life. In South Africa, HIV prevalence for the population overall is around 10 percent; in the age groups 20–24 and 30–34 it is around 25 percent; and in the age group 25–29, around 33 percent. Numbers do no justice to individuals. Consequently, it becomes the small details that move us, in bringing things back to personal proportions.

Small details, like the beaded crocodile I bought from the AIDS Hospice craft stall. The crocodile is supposed to bring good luck. I often think of the man or woman in whose young and frail fingers its beadwork body would be fashioned; how they would sense the cruel irony of their own luck running out. They are quite probably dead by now.

Yet, what strikes me about Africa is the preoccupation with living, not dying. One does not meet AIDS ‘victims’ or feel ‘pity’ for ‘sufferers’. These are outsider labels, and one quickly realises the terms of reference are inaccurate. HIV is something you live with; everyone has a contribution to make; you get on with making it. Needless to say, we met some extraordinary people.