Free Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, a Country's Hope by Uzodinma Iweala

I use her own example to help somebody, that is, by telling the person that, ‘See, my sister have died on this thing. Please!’ I don’t think that God will punish me for that. I know that God will have mercy on me that I am not abusing my sister.
    “I want to talk to people concerning this thing. Me, I wanted even to stand in my village and at least arrange the women, the men, or the youth—all of them—and discuss it with them: ‘See this thing that you people are saying about this girl. Many of you, you have not been tested. Many of you have it. It may be killing some women, married women, they will not know! One two, one two they die. You won’t know if it is HIV.’ That is what I wanted to do. That is what I have determined in my mind because I feel that people are dying in that village and they don’t know what is killing them. Maybe it might be AIDS that is killing them and there are drugs to prevent the thing. Another of my sister said, ‘No! Before you will start saying those things, they will say we done carry am.’” Elizabeth sighed and crossed her arms. “I just left. They buried her, and I just left. I left.”
    Elizabeth’s friend need not have died. But HIV/ AIDS has such power that it can cut people off from one another, leaving those who most need support isolated and vulnerable. Its stigma and the resulting fear of abandonment and discrimination make extremely difficult a greater openness that can help treat its symptoms and prevent its spread. An ordinary sickness does not cause so fraught and convoluted a reaction.
    Elizabeth stopped speaking. We sat together on the warm concrete, our bodies separated by two bottles of Coke I had retrieved from the fridge in my room. Insects buzzed about the fluorescent light above us, their shadows floating across our bodies. Somewhere beyond the hotel compound, the highway pulsed with the horns of tractor-trailers warning cars, motorcycles, and pedestrians as they sped down an unlit road.
    “When I think about my sister, I feel it very well,” she said after some time. “There is no day I don’t think about her since I lost her. There is a place we worshiped together where there’s a particular lady that sings ‘Everything You Find Is in Jesus.’ If you find money, that it’s in Jesus; if you find health, it’s in Jesus; if you find life, it’s in Jesus. If they pray such prayers or sing such chorus now, I really feel. I will be in the church crying. I cry for her own. I do feel her. I’ve not forgotten about her. I feel her very well.
    “I shed tear for my sister each time when I see people surviving with this thing. In fact, when I was sick with ulcer, I went to Nnamdi Azikiwe Teaching Hospital, and if you see the lineup of people with HIV to collect drugs, that’s why I say, ‘How can you just lost your life like that?’ You understand? Because people go there and take drugs free! Then how will you just stay and lost your life like that? I don’t think God has designed that she has to die. She doesn’t have to died.”

SEX
    I ’m actually going to a brothel , I remember thinking as my friend Doc and I drove to a truck stop about an hour west of his village clinic. He had set up services there for a number of sex workers patronized by the intercity truck drivers who stopped for a few hours’ rest. At the truck stop, fields of tall brown grass and low shrubs stretched outward from the junction and its impromptu settlement of zinc-roofed, mud-brick buildings. Around us large trucks rested as their engines clicked while cooling and their drivers propped themselves against their large tires or in the shade beneath their chassis. The men were almost catatonic from a full day’s work of driving. Their only motions were to raise plastic cups of water to their lips. Not too far away, a line of women sat silently against a low cement wall, some of them eating roasted corn, others fanning themselves against the heat.
    “Those women are sex