Tales From the Front Line: HIV/AIDS 2003-2005, South Africa

From 2003-2005, I was a Peace Corps Volunteer assigned to NGO Capacity-building/HIV/AIDS education in rural Venda, South Africa. At the time, the country was experiencing a crisis of epidemic proportions, with an estimated 25% of the population infected with HIV. During my time in South Africa, I lived with a Venda family and worked designing educational campaigns for a regional NGO doing anti-rape and anti-domestic violence work. I thought that in keeping with many of the readings for Week 3, I would write a short narrative of what it was like to live and work in South Africa at the time many of the articles were written.

One of our performance groups works with Swedish visiting artists 

When 25% percent of the population is HIV+, it's difficult at first not to look at all groups of people as a statistic. I remember being in rooms with 10, 15, 40 people and doing the math, realizing that one in four of my new friends statistically should be positive.

Talk about the virus imbued everyday life with a constant awareness of the risks. Boxes of condoms were everywhere: on the backs of indoor toilets, in the post office, in the schools. In my work bringing health campaigns to schools, teaching preschoolers that their body is their body and not anyone else's to touch, we also taught the difference between condoms and balloons. Condoms were so ubiquitous that preschoolers were known to pick up used condoms off the ground, mistaking them for balloons.

With all the talk, one would think that there would be fewer infections. Not true. A thing about HIV in South Africa is that a quarter of people had it, but no one knew they had it. No one knew their status. That would require going to a doctor and getting a test. Doctors rarely ordered tests because they cost money, or because the patients didn't ask for them in the first place. At that time, one of the only groups of people who knew their status was pregnant women or women who had been pregnant since the testing of pregnant women became standard. Many if not most of the people who were infected were married; no one was telling people yet: "Even if you are married, get tested." No one wanted to think their spouse was cheating on them, so they didn't get a test.

Sirkona, our circus group

Fidelity in rural South Africa is a tricky thing; it's the subject of much judgment on behalf of western aid workers and volunteers. I rarely talked to my friends and family about fidelity in Venda because of this judgment. In South Africa, and I believe in other areas in sub-Saharan Africa, the slogan for HIV/AIDS campaigns is to use the ABCs. A stands for Abstain; abstain from sex. The Peace Corps's acceptance of PEPFAR money for some of the projects we were on required us to record that we were teaching this as an option in all of our HIV/AIDS work. If you couldn't abstain, you were supposed to Be Faithful. At least, if you were going to have sex, don't sleep around. And if you couldn't not sleep around, Condomise. Use a condom.

But fidelity wasn't part of the operating system of sexual politics in Venda (and apparently in the rest of South Africa and, as I've heard, in large parts of the continent). I hesitate to say that it wasn't part of the "culture," because while at one time (and still in some areas) it had been part of the culture and the economy of Venda, with men taking multiple wives, monogamous marriage as implemented under colonial, apartheid, and missionary regimes was the theoretical standard in Venda. But either polygamous practices remained as a common and largely internally unquestioned sexual practice; social suffering under apartheid regimes devalued life to the point that people no longer cared how their actions affected themselves and others; the transient nature of the South African economy, structured thus under apartheid, made it nearly impossible to maintain the strong family structures that [hypothetically and questionably] lay the foundation of strong democracies; or combination of the above. In South Africa 2003-2005, men who worked did not live in Venda because of low economic opportunity, and men who lived in Venda generally did not work. Men lived in the cities, 6-8-10-15-20 hours away, and women lived in the villages. It was perfectly normal for a man to have a family in the city and a family in the village, but the women often did not know about each other, or it was an open secret.

I knew so many partnerless women in Venda. They volunteered in the clinics and home-based care networks; they started small

One of my best friends in Venda, Muofhe

CBOs for orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs). They went to charismatic churches. They told me about their husbands, but I never met them. They came for the occasional holiday. One of the hardest things about living in Venda was being close to so many women who were probably HIV+ but who wouldn't ever know it.

I went to so many funerals. I could have gone to a funeral in my village every weekend if I had wanted to. But when discussing how the (usually) man died, it was always "He was sick. Oh, he was very, very sick." An occasional auntie or friend would give me a knowing look: "He liked to have fun, that man. He had a good time." In walking through the cemeteries, most of the dates of birth were in the 1960s. These men were all 40-45 years old when they died. Even now, I get the occasional message from one of my friends there, that so-and-so has died. Still, no one says AIDS.

"We are tired of being raped."

Communities didn't know what to do with all of the orphans. Grannies ("go-gos") assumed responsibility when able, but in many cases households were child-headed, with a girl or boy of 10-15 years providing for the family. Small parcels of aid money were allocated to CBOs in which community volunteers, paid by a stipend, would provide breakfast, after-school care, and dinner for these families. In my opinion, the unique thing South Africa has going for it is its national philosophy of Ubuntu, or "I am a person because you are a person." People take care of each other. In the rural areas, no one is homeless. No one is hungry in the true sense of the term as long as someone near them has food.

I don't know how things have changed since leaving South Africa almost nine years ago. I last worked in very, very rural Kenya where the main health issues were food security and basic sanitation. I have a friend who has worked in South Africa recently and whose husband still lives there. I've put a call into her and will update the class as I am able to talk her.