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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250086389 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/02/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 387 KB |
About the Author
Susan Hunter is an independent consultant to world health organizations (UNAIDS, UNICEF, USAID). She is the author of Black Death (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), selected by the London Times online as one of the top five books on AIDS ever written. She lives in upstate New York.
Read an Excerpt
Black Death
Aids in Africa
By Susan S. Hunter
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2003 Susan S. HunterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-08638-9
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The early morning bustle of Kyotera town, in the heart of the Uganda's district of Rakai, had already begun. Radios blared, children cried, men called out to one another on their way to work, but Molly's warm brown eyes didn't snap open until daylight bounced off the rude stucco walls of her room and hit her chubby face. She was still tired after a restless sleep, but Molly knew she'd have to hurry this morning. The meeting with UK's Save the Children started at nine-thirty, and she had to remind Pauline to clean the reverend's shabby suit and make sure he wore his best dress collar before she ran over to the church hall to check on the lunch. Calvary Women's Group was cooking fish and matooke, rice, and offal for one hundred people, no small job in the church's outdoor kitchen. She'd given Pauline the money to buy fish and banana yesterday, but they'd need plenty of firewood to get the rice boiled in time. She smiled with satisfaction. Something was finally going to happen.
Robina Nyeko, the district administrator, had called the district-wide meeting so she could talk with Rakai's chiefs and subchiefs about creating volunteer village committees to look after the orphans, care for AIDS victims, and help stricken families as much as they could within their own small means. Parents were too ill to work, families were destitute, and dying was only a small part of their troubles. What she wouldn't give, Molly thought, for a little more help, as she watched these poor children grieve for their lost parents, abandoned by destitute relatives overloaded by the deaths of too many sons and daughters, helpless in a bad world. Yesterday she'd come upon Mrs. Kategera's five and seven year olds, who suffered through the long death of their father just last month, crying so hard she thought her heart would break. They'd worked all day on empty stomachs for the butcher, Nsubuga, who'd asked them for twenty bundles of banana leaves to wrap his meat. When they brought him the last of it, he'd refused to pay, claiming to passersby that he simply didn't know why the children were bothering him for money.
Molly spotted Nina and Fabio being brutally embarrassed by the mean-spirited butcher in front of a growing crowd and ushered them away before they were blamed for any other wrongdoings. She was annoyed at the villagers for discouraging the children's determination, hard work, and inventiveness. They were ravenous after roaming the fields all day, but the tears spilling down their skinny, dirty cheeks dried into streaks as they ate their fill from Molly's cook pot. She walked them home so she could wash their mother, helpless in bed with AIDS, and clean the house up. Their one-room hut was badly in need of rethatching, Molly thought as they approached through the banana fields. Maybe she could persuade her brother-in-law to organize some men to get the roof fixed before the rains started again.
Molly greeted Mrs. Kategera, helped the emaciated woman up from her mat and walked with her out into the sunshine. She washed the diarrhea-stained sheets, hauled more water, gave the children and their mother a bath, and decided to clean their clothes while there was still enough daylight left to dry them. Mrs. Kategera's throat, full of thrush, was too sore for talk, but she smiled as Molly held her hand and told her how brave her children were, adding a few choice bits of village gossip to make her laugh. She'd found some old shorts for the boy but the little girl sat shivering, wrapped in the family's one tattered blanket until her dress dried. As Molly unsnarled the children's hair and braided it again, they began smiling too. Resilient, Molly thought. I hope it lasts.
As daylight waned, the children huddled close to their mother for warmth, and Molly stretched the thin blanket over their equally thin bodies. Taking Mrs. Kategera's clothes for washing, she stopped by the priest's house and asked him to alert the mission sisters. She feared for these children. What kind of people would they grow up to be if they were left on their own to cope? What would happen when their mother died? They had no relatives in the area because their parents had come across the border from Rwanda many years ago to work on one of Rakai's richest farms. Molly had made up her mind a long time ago that she would do all she could for people with AIDS and never give up hope. After days when it was all too much to bear, like yesterday, she'd cry herself to sleep, praying hard for some kind of inspiration.
Today it seemed like God had finally answered her prayers. November 3, 1989. She'd never forget the date. Molly rose and knelt by her small wood frame bed, glancing down at the foam mattress her husband had bought the year before he'd died. He'd said that they deserved a little luxury in their old age. Hard to believe, she thought, it's only been two years. Molly tried to decide which of her two worn blankets she would give to Nina and Fabio's mother, choosing the smaller one because it had the fewest holes. Then she closed her eyes and began. "Dear God," she prayed, "let this day go well. You've let the British see and know our struggles. Guide us to get more help for these children so they don't die of cold and hunger, sickness, and sadness. Let them know only your joy and not the harshness of life at such an early age. May you bring your judgment only upon the wicked of the world." Like that butcher Nsubuga, she thought.
"By the way, dear Lord, please help me find a job for Pauline's oldest son. His mother's sick and she can't afford the medicine." Pauline had been coughing up blood for at least two weeks, and Molly knew her tuberculosis was another symptom of her Slim Disease. The ugly black scales were growing thicker on her face. "Six more orphans coming your way, Sweet Jesus, and it won't be very long now. Please remind these Save the Children people to bring a few extra blankets." Baby Jesus might have gone through a lot of things, she thought, but he'd never been an orphan. She crossed herself and rose. Pull up your socks, Molly girl, the day's only just begun. Don't start thinking too much about all these children. You'll drown.
Molly opened the door of her room just in time to see a parade of turkeys rush across the courtyard. They belonged to Mrs. Nyeko but wandered all over town. She called them "the Americans" because they reminded her of the new missionaries in Kyotera, rushing from here to there in a flock, scowling, busily inspecting things, very self-absorbed. She crossed to the outdoor toilet, shooing six enormous cockroaches away as she entered. When she was done, she went into the shower room she shared with twenty neighbors, removed her wrap, and drew cold water into a large flat basin. She soaped up, splashed the water over her back with a plastic cup to rinse, wrapped herself back up in her katenge, and crossed to her room to dress. Angela had already made up her bed and put a pink hibiscus flower and a spray of pine on her pillow. "Thank you, dear Lord," Molly said, "for all the small beauties you give us in this world."
Anxiety wrinkled Pauline's large, flat forehead as she waited for Molly to cross the road. Two bicycles were coming rapidly down the hill. Molly winced and lowered her eyes when she caught sight of the barkcloth-wrapped body strapped to the second man's back seat, rigid on a board sticking out on either side. "That'll be the second funeral in Nkebega's family in a year," Pauline muttered. "Those boys really liked their sex play," Molly agreed, "but if they'd had more sense on the black market, they'd be coming home in the back of a pickup truck." Pauline, a tall Ankole, laughed down at Molly, who was a short, fat barrel of a Ganda. "Never blaspheme the dead," she chuckled. "As soon as you're finished in the kitchen, Mrs. Nyeko wants to see you. She needs help with the orphan report."
Molly had typed the orphan enumeration on Robina's prerevolutionary manual. There were 8,000 names in Kyotera alone, with four more counties still to be tabulated. Tough and seasoned to adversity, a great soldier and good administrator, Robina had sensed the tidal wave before anyone else had seen it coming. But it was Molly who'd suggested that she ask the chiefs, who had traditional responsibility for the welfare of village families, to list all their orphans. If they could demonstrate the awful impact of AIDS and the number of children that were being left behind, they might get some attention and help for Rakai, at least a little more than local communities could muster on their own. Deaths were such an everyday occurrence in the district that farmers had cut the grieving period from three days to one so they could still take care of their crops. The government had to be persuaded to stop ignoring the issue. The orphans in Luwero district created by Obote's genocidal purge in the mid-1980s were old news. Time the spotlight switched to Uganda's new tragedy, Molly thought, the day-to-day tragedy of AIDS.
* * *
On his return in 1836 from his five-year round-the-world voyage on the scientific ship HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin began to live two lives in earnest. In public he was an upstanding, hardworking, country-dwelling geologist. In private he harbored thoughts that would revolutionize the world. Darwin's voyage, scheduled for two years, had lasted almost five and yielded uncountable geologic and biological specimens and twenty-four densely packed notebooks of observations. To Darwin, the voyage had been "by far the most important event in my life" and one for which his love of hunting, brief training in geological fieldwork, and greedy reading of travelogues and treatises in natural history had prepared him inadvertently but admirably. While purportedly studying medicine at Edinburgh University — before the brutal practice of the trade turned his stomach for good when he saw an operation on a child with no anesthetic — he had developed his lifelong passion for natural history. A lecture by John James Audubon on North American birds inspired him to study with John Edmonstone, a freed slave who had been taught taxidermy by his former master and supported himself mounting specimens for the university's natural history museum. An allowance from Darwin's disapproving father, who had been persuaded by Darwin's uncle (and later father-in-law) Josiah Wedgwood that the voyage would prepare his son for the ministry, allowed Darwin to accept the loosely defined role of captain's companion and naturalist on the Beagle. It soon became one of history's most inspired volunteer assignments.
Freed for a while from economic concerns, Darwin could conduct scientific research to satisfy his curiosity, like other well-bred philosophers of the day. He also knew that his future income depended on the extent and quality of the specimens he collected on the voyage. Scientific curiosities were high entertainment for the Victorian public. The hummingbird collection of ornithologist John Gould, who later identified Darwin's bird specimens, was viewed by the royal family and crowds of commoners. The entrance fees for Gould's exhibit at the London zoological gardens paid his living expenses and financed later collecting expeditions. Darwin resolved that his own specimens would be worthy of "the largest & most central collection" in London, and he was right. Few scientists of the day had the opportunity to make a journey of similar length or scope or had Darwin's drive and experience in seeking out, preserving, and identifying specimens of great variety and comprehensiveness.
Darwin's letters home, published by the geologist Charles Lyell and fellow scientist Adam Sedgewick, and a brief showing of Megatherium bones he had collected in Brazil's Bahía Blanca and shipped home in time for the British Association meeting in Cambridge in 1833, stirred public interest and excitement. On his return, Darwin was immediately named a fellow of the Geological Society and shortly thereafter a fellow of the Royal Society of London, science's highest honor. He had won his renown by five years of plain hard work, but now he had a bigger task in front of him. Publicly, that job was to edit thousands of pages of notebooks that he had kept on the voyage. Privately, he wanted to make sense of five years of flora, fauna, and people he had seen whose diversity did not fit with contemporary scientific theory. He devoted himself to the public task first, and The Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle was published in 1839. The private task would take twenty years.
Although conscientious and dedicated, Darwin was a bold spirit. Since the Beagle's movement made him seasick, he left the ship frequently to traverse hundreds of miles on foot and on horseback, joining the ship at its next port. Of his five years on the Beagle, only eighteen months were spent on board, and the longest stretch was forty-seven days. He fought his way out of the middle of armed political rebellions and enlisted the hardened gauchos of Argentina, who joined him on long hunting and collecting expeditions, as staunch friends. Selected for the Beagle's voyage because his upper-class background made him suitable company for the ship's captain, Robert Fitz Roy, Darwin nevertheless rolled up his sleeves to help the crew tow the ship's boats upstream on their river explorations and once even saved the Beagle from a tidal wave. Fitz Roy initially found Darwin's company so stimulating that he ignored Robert McCormick, the ship's official naturalist and surgeon. Annoyed by continual snubs, McCormick became so angry when the ship's carpenters began preparing packing cases for Darwin's first homebound shipment of specimens that he abandoned the Beagle at Rio less than four months after sailing from Plymouth, bought a souvenir parrot, and headed home (with Darwin's specimens) on the HMS Tyne.
Fitz Roy wanted Darwin to find scientific proof for the Book of Genesis. When he announced that the prehistoric Megatherium jawbone in Darwin's first load of fossils belonged to an animal that had been too slow to get on Noah's Ark, Darwin held his tongue. Struck by how much the gigantic prehistoric creature resembled South America's modern sloth, Darwin wondered why God had made the same species before and after the Flood. The idea that one could have evolved into the other because of environmental change seemed sensible to Darwin but theologically dangerous and scientifically absurd according to contemporary canon.
The Beagle carried three Tiera del Fuegians — York Minster, Fuegia Basket, and Jeremy Button — whom Fitz Roy had captured on an earlier voyage to the tip of South America. Fitz Roy had "civilized" them in England so they could proselytize their compatriots. Back on their native ground, the Fuegans quickly fell back into old ways, demoralizing the English parson who accompanied them so much he reboarded the Beagle as quickly as he could. The pathetic outcome of his inspired work put Fitz Roy in a black mood. Darwin's questioning of Christian orthodoxy and the Bible's creation story left Fitz Roy annoyed and unsettled, a grievously insulted host and sullen companion. During the four years and nine months of his voyage, Darwin revealed his deepest thoughts on geological, floral, and faunal change — "this wonderful relationship between the living and the dead" as he put it — only in his letters to Lyell, whose 1830 Principles of Geology argued that change in the earth's features had not required divine intervention but were the result of the natural forces of rain, wind, and erosion. Lyell's book had been Darwin's constant companion as he lay seasick in his hammock on the Beagle's first leg south to Tenerife.
Darwin saw that as the environment changed, species had to change or they did not survive. Since environments had changed continuously on earth — evident to him from his inspection of the geological and biological record of "cataclysms" all around the world — species came and went, adapted or died. But what, he asked himself, was the mechanism of evolution? What drove the whole thing forward? Darwin gradually realized that one of the major forces in evolution was the force of disease. Humans evolve by adapting to disease, he knew, or they would die out just like any other species. This was an especially poignant realization for a man who complained in 1840 that he had become "a dull, old spiritless dog" at the age of thirty-one because of the chronic illness he had contracted in South America. He fretted to Lyell that "it is a bitter mortification to me to digest the conclusion that 'the race is for the strong' and that I shall probably do little but be content to admire the strides others make in science." Because of his persistence in the face of lifelong illness, however, Darwin became one of history's greatest scientists and his concept of evolution one of history's greatest ideas.
* * *
HIV/AIDS is fast becoming the worst human disease disaster the world has ever seen. Although still in its infancy, it is clear now that in the next ten to fifteen years, AIDS will claim more lives than any other human epidemic ever recorded. Even if a cure is found tomorrow, AIDS is triggering a disaster worse than any the human race has ever known. By 2010, its death toll will be higher than that of the two world wars combined, and it will soon be worse than the total claimed by all wars put together. Every year and a half, it claims more human lives than the Holocaust, and with the pace accelerating, there will be a new holocaust every year. There is simply nothing left to compare it to, no scale of human suffering and devastation against which this terrible plague can possibly be measured. The global drag it has created is affecting every single human being on the planet without exception and is soon to get much, much worse as epidemics in Africa and Asia hit their stride. While infections in a few countries have leveled or are declining, in most countries HIV is spreading like wildfire. The 28 million deaths from AIDS at the end of 2002 are only a paltry beginning. It is little wonder that HIV/AIDS is the first disease to be labeled a global security threat by the United Nations Security Council, and the first disease to be the subject of an entire UN General Assembly meeting. At a November 2002 Washington dinner honoring UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for his diplomatic work in obtaining sanctions against Iraq, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell surprised the guests when he switched the focus from Baghdad and declared that the most serious problem facing the world today is not terrorism but the HIV/AIDS epidemic. AIDS is a not a future threat, it is destabilizing our entire planet right now and will have far worse consequences than any event a terrorist could ever invent.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black Death by Susan S. Hunter. Copyright © 2003 Susan S. Hunter. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Preface,
Dedication,
Chapter One: Introduction,
Chapter Two: AIDS and the World,
Chapter Three: Africa's Political and Economic Development,
Chapter Four: Epidemic Rules, Part I: Causes and Conditions,
Chapter Five: Epidemic Rules, Part II: Internal Dynamics of Epidemics,
Chapter Six: Sexually Transmitted Diseases,
Chapter Seven: Disease and Evolution,
Chapter Eight: Evolution and Epidemic Management,
Notes,
Index,
Copyright,