28 Stories of AIDS in Africa
I’ve been reading a book entitled 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa compiled by Stephanie Nolen. The publicity for the book states
In 28, you’ll meet the doctor dodging bullets as she runs a makeshift clinic in war-torn Congo, hear why Nelson Mandela decided to go public about the cause of his son’s death, encounter the trucker who has spent a lifetime picking up prostitutes on the lonely highways of East Africa, and have an audience with the Botswanan beauty queen proud to be crowned ‘Miss HIV Stigma-free’. Stephanie Nolen’s eloquent and sympathetic book paints a fresh and inspiring portrait of Africa in crisis, making it impossible for us to ignore and impossible to forget.
Zimbabwean, Prisca Mhlolo shares her story in this remarkable book. You can read her account here and we encourage you to buy 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa online. Below is a short excerpt from Prisca’s story . . .
All the anger shock and pain of that moment were clear in Prisca’s face twenty later years later. “The way she said it was something else: AIDS! Where did the AIDS come from? I looked down at my daughter in my lap and she was not a child any more, she was something-she was now AIDS to me. I didn’t want anything to do with that child. I took her and threw her-she hit the corner of the desk and got a big cut. She collapsed. And I ran from that hospital into the street screaming. Doctors were coming and they wanted to get hold of me but they couldn’t because I was running. In Mazoe Street, just by the entrance, I collapsed. The next thing I knew, I woke up and it was two weeks later.”
When she awoke in a hospital bed with her husband standing next to her, she turned to him in anguish. “I said, ‘Bruce, we are dying, we are already dead.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I told him about Agnes. I told him, ‘Because of AIDS. ‘I’m a moving grave as you see me.’ That’s what I told him.