living in twilight

Today I did an HIV teaching in a place called Mbia Bungue. I got home about 2:30 in the afternoon. Now its 6:30 PM, and I'm still shedding off the suppressed emotion of the experience. It's always that way afterward but I can't get used to it.

There were 19 Mozambican adults at the seminar, men and women, sitting in a polite half-circle against the bamboo walls of a low, grass-roofed machessa nestled out in nowhere. Mbia Bungue is about a half hour off the main highway. I pulled off the road and followed a dirt path up and down winding hills, deeper into the grass and interior, until my guide, Pastor Paulo, announced: "Stop." In actual fact, you don't have to go far in Mozambique to find yourself in bush country; about 10 feet off the paved road will usually put you beyond the reaches of electricity. Assuming there are paved roads.

I think what's so stressful for me about teaching people about HIV and AIDS is what's on the line. I don't just mean life or death, though obviously they loom menacingly at the forefront. Plenty of diseases kill you. HIV is one of the few that, in the process of holding a knife to your neck, also pulls in just about everything that makes life good: sex, childbirth, marriage, romantic love, children, religion, community standing. And those things drag with them even more compelling forces: hope, ambition, dreams, pleasure, so on. This all goes about a mile deeper than I'm talking about it, but my brain is too fried to dig deeper.

I talked today to this Farmer's Association, which is what the group actually is, because I'd been working with their leader, Pastor Paulo, on orphan support for their area. One day last month over sodas, he looked up at me and said:

"You know, the government spends a lot of money to educate people about AIDS in this part of Mozambique because it is part of the Corridor [the major transportation route extending from Zimbabwe to the Indian Ocean, with the highest rate of HIV in the country, more than 30%]. But in reality, the programs only help people in the cities and along the highway. Where I live, in Mbia Bungue, we are all farmers and we don't know anything about this disease."

So I set my Coke down and said I'd be happy to come out and give a seminar.

I have a lot of fun when I give these teachings. I enjoy talking about bodily fluids and sex and medicine and condoms and fidelity and infidelity and anatomy and orphans and facts and facts and facts instead of rumors and lies and gossip. I do. It doesn't embarrass me and I relish demonstrating a freedom to discuss it respectfully. I like pointing out that God created everything. I love making everyone feel terribly, horribly uncomfortable and then loosening them up again by making them laugh. It is a deep joy to see the depth of people's kindness, humor, sincerity, and desire for truth.

I know that in the end it is their decision how they will live their life. I say:

"It's hard. It is not easy to hear. But we live in a time of HIV. This is the time in which we live."

I tell them all this and, anyway, they're already nodding their heads. They know it. It's scary realizing they might not be understanding as much of the facts as I think they are, or that if I teach badly it has big implications. Really scary. But merely being the teacher takes some pressure off. Their lives rest in hands much bigger than my own. I am talking about God.

HOWEVER.

It's the way they get somber, become quiet and distant-eyed, that drives it home for me, what's at stake. Men don't want to kill their girlfriends. Women don't want to infect their children. They also don't want to face a lifetime of bearing no more children. When I say there are antiretroviral medicines which will keep them alive for many, many long years - until their heads are full of white hair - as long as they take them every single day without fail - they know that what this means is a whole lot of hardship. Because they live a good two hours from the nearest health post, if they're lucky (an hour on foot, an hour by chapa). Because they can't afford to take a chapa into town every month to get their free medicine. Because the side effects of the medicine often feel worse than the disease itself. Because it all depends on good nutrition and enough to eat, and they still live with meses de fome (months of hunger). Because their husbands won't use a condom. Because women don't like to marry men with a fatal transmittable disease. Because when you're HIV+, you're automatically someone who did something bad. The first thing you lose is your friends.

Its not just about dying. What I'm asking them to consider, reshape, and remove, is so much of what it means to be human. I put a brave face on it, I offer glimpses of hope, the reality of what hopeful possibilities do exist, and they're attentive. But in the end, AIDS is AIDS.

AIDS is AIDS.

Which is why I inevitably end up feeling like shit afterward, no matter how well it went.