get up, stand up, don't give up the fight

Today is World AIDS Day – the twentieth anniversary of the first one, in fact. This year's slogan is 'Lead, Empower, Deliver.' Many milestones, some progress, much sorrow. We’re seeing changes, small ones, but there is still no end in sight. The number of new HIV infections has declined, certainly: 3 million in 2001, 2.7 million in 2007. But that’s still 2.7 million people. Fewer people are dying: 2.2 million in 2005, 2 million in 2007. But that’s still 2 million people. Nearly 8 million people are still waiting for treatment. Over 7,400 individuals were infected each day in 2007 – 7,400! That’s more people being infected every day than the entire population of my university town.

But this is the problem with HIV/AIDS. It’s a numbers game to most people. You see the figures written down, and you struggle to imagine. You gasp in surprise when you hear how many children are HIV positive (about 1,000 of those 7,400 daily infections are children under 15) and you puzzle over prevalence rates – can it really be 12%, 15%, over 25%?

In Rwanda, it’s a bit about the numbers. The official prevalence rate is quoted at 3% (3.5% is the highest published estimate I’ve ever seen). There is statistically no way that this is even close to accurate. Not even a little bit. For the sake of my safety sanity at the moment, however, I’m going to leave that analysis for another day. I will, however, throw out a few numbers for the statistics-lovers among you: Of more then 154,000 Rwandans requiring ARVs, 68,034 receive treatment. 75.8% of women and 78.1% of men here have never been tested for HIV. Only 19.7% of women and 40.9% of men use condoms consistently. 19,000 Rwandan children are HIV positive. 220,000 are AIDS orphans.

For me, though, it’s about the faces behind the numbers. The woman on the street the other day who begged me for money for ARVs (the official line is that ARV treatment in Rwanda is free – it is, for pregnant women and those deemed ‘low income;’ for everyone else, it’s approximately $20USD a month… The average Rwandan earns about 1,000RWF a week, around $2USD). My 21 year old friend who has endured and survived more than his fair share of tragedy and still just never stops going on. The tell-tale signs of ARV side effects on the men who call out the names of buses. All my friends here who refuse to get tested, because they just don’t want to know. The women at one of the camps I work with who recently underwent VCT and came back with a positive result. Sitting in a room surrounded by these women, all returned refugees living in camps because they have nowhere else to go, all young, all married, almost all mothers. There is nothing more heartbreaking than looking into the eyes of a woman bouncing a new baby on her lap when you both know she has no chance of seeing that child grow up.

For me, right now, the statistics on AIDS in Africa are all around me, every minute. But it’s important to remember that AIDS in not an ‘African’ disease, or an ‘African’ problem. It happens at home, too – we have just been lucky. Prevention and education are everyone’s business. HIV affects us all. Take a few minutes today to find out your HIV status.