something great (until, unfortunately, my view of it takes a precipitous downward dip culminating in an all-time low of nothingness)

The need is enormous, so it's just a start - but here is some good news, in a country that could desperately use it.

From the Health Alliance International website: Treatment Access Data, as of September 2007

• Total Number of People Infected: ~ 1,655,514

  This number represents the total number of people in Mozambique estimated to be currently infected with the HIV virus.
  

• Total Number of People in Specialized HIV/AIDS Care: ~ 61,000

  This is the approximate number of Mozambicans who have entered one of 30 public sector HIV/AIDS day hospitals, after receiving a positive HIV test.
  

• Total Number of People Treatment Eligible: ~ 270,317

  This number represents the total number of people in Mozambique who would be hypothetically eligible for treatment based on their clinical presentation (estimate that 15% of a given population of treatment naive HIV positive patients will have a CD4 below 200 and/or WHO stage 3 or 4.
  

• Total Number on AIDS Treatment (HAART): ~ 78,236

  HAART: Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (also known as the "Triple Drug Cocktail")

• Percent Increase in Treatment from June 2004 to current date: over 1500%

• Increase from 4,617 people in treatment in June 2004 to 78,236 in September 2007

An increase of 1500%? Sound the bells, bring out the mariachi band! Its long overdue, but you take what you can get.

I did a short HIV teaching at Gondola Mennonite church yesterday, which is the tiny, mud brick church that Jenny and Joel work with (I am in awe of their tenacity in this task). I know people there reasonably well, having visited occasionally; but even so, only men stuck around for the teaching, no women, no kids. I got in my Four Fluids chant ("Repeat after me: Semen! Vaginal fluid! Blood! Breastmilk! Again!"), and was struck as usual by the novelty of this information for my audience, though they've certainly encountered plenty of public health ads about AIDS. It makes me wonder if the whole thing doesn't need to be simplified yet further.

I find it a weird state of affairs to be so focused on HIV/AIDS, which is an incongruous, jarring thing, a dissonant, atonal chord, the world off-kilter, a lid screwed on wrong, a dis-ease instead of an ease. As I prioritize my life around it, even... feel a bit addicted to it, there's a part inside me that wants to shake off an imaginary creepy-crawly and say, Yech. Unnatural.

There's even a whole industry around the disequilibrium, a gargantuan one. And its become sort of cool to be about the dis-ease, which is weird.

Walking back to J+J's house afterward, we slipped through a huge, somber crowd gathered for a funeral. Cholera death, it came out, after Joel made some discreet inquiries. The three of us just looked at each other, exasperated. Three days, that's it, of puking and diarrhea - that's how you die of cholera in Mozambique.

People just keep dying! They die of everything nobody dies of in the Western world. Vumba finally came back to work after a week on the edge of death, he reported, a full week spent at the casa de curandeiro (the house of the local spiritualist who does 'natural medicine' and charges exorbitant rates, the politically-incorrect 'witch doctor'). He was stricken with... I don't know, probably malaria, everything. But what he was most stricken with was the curses of his in-laws, all the espiritos maus sent to kill him.

How much does one people/country/continent have to deal with? Enough already with the death and despair!

These are not my most enlightened thoughts. This post started out optimistic but now I've written myself into a serious funk. I am having a bad Developing Country Day.

Plus - Sara and I have left-over chocolate frosting from the birthday party but ran out of crackers to spread it on. Goodbye.