Imagine being unfortunate enough to be born into a poor community in South Africa. Odds are, your parents will die before you're halfway to double figures yourself, and you may not be guaranteed to get there either.
Someone made the comment: 'But it's their fault; just don't sleep around or use a condom.' Not that simple. If your parents are dead, and you're starving, it is tempting to shack up with an uncle or friend of the family who has a house and an income. Unfortunately, this 'friend of the family' passes on the disease in exchange for a temporary lease on life. Don't believe me? The New York Times covered exactly this angle in an article titled AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls .
I was touched by a documentary we watched before the AIDS concert, on Nkosi Johnson. I was touched by a little boy born with AIDS and having to face that death sentence everyday. Not supposed to eat pizza, supposed to remember his medications, losing his hair...I was also touched by the white woman who took care of him, fought for and with him. But it was at the 46664 concert that the insight crystalised. Very few people at the concert are the victims of AIDS. But they - we - do need to know what is happening in a world away from our world. The message in the bottle is this:
The victims in South Africa are the poor. They are the victims of circumstance, they are the victims of neglect. They are dying in droves, many as a result of murder, many having been raped - die later suffering perhaps an even worse fate - and then, there are those who die of AIDS in South Africa. Half a million a year.
The reason this disease is so hard to imagine is because, if you have access to the internet, if you have a computer, you are alsready so disconnected from the poor, and the reality of what it means to live in a shack, vulnerable to the elements, including human rogues and the dark sicknesses they carry, this reality is impossible to imagine.
Can the rich be blamed for being disconnected to the poor? Crime essentially drives a wedge between these worlds. Why? Because the wealthy retreat behind eletrified perimeter fencing, in an effort to protect themselves. They dare not venture into squatter camps for fear of being attacked or injured. And thus the circle of poverty is reinforced, rendered incontrovertible.
The saviour of the poor, interesting enough, may turn out to come from a misunderstood and misrepresented individual. Jacob Zuma. In the Financial Mail magazine he has been described as truly a man of the people: uneducated, but importantly, a man who genuinely understands and cares about the poor. he attends funerals without a press contingent. He visits widows. He himself came from a poor background.
In my opinion what South Africa needs is to learn how to care for one another again, particularly the poor. We care by first thinking of another, not of ourselves. And perhaps, instead of seeing the poor as the squalid sprawl of shacks, there is also the beautiful landscapes of Transkei. There, on a field, with the blue sea in the distance, we can offer to help a farmer, and return in December to see what the yield is. Perhaps the farmer will give his patron a cob of corn, invite the city slicker around a fire. But the point is, South Africans need to take hands, wherever possible. If we don't do this soon, a million ghosts of this country will haunt our dreams, wherever it is that we sleep.
Also read: When a Pill Is Not Enough
A face of HIV/AIDS, Nkosi Johnson
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