World AIDS Day

The AIDS virus was born somewhere deep inside the forests of the western side of Africa near the Congo. While no one can pinpoint at exactly what point the virus jumped from animals to humans, the reality is that it did sometime in the 1960’s, and the virus quickly spread as it traveled down the Kinshasa highway and from there spread across the rest of the continent and to the rest of the world. Today AIDS is a plague on the world and continues to kill millions with no cure. Every year, one day is set aside to raise awareness of this plague, Dec 1st was that day.

Kenya is no stranger to the AIDS virus. Currently, Kenya has an AIDS prevalence rate of ~5% which, with a total population of just over 30 million means that ~1.5 million people are infected with the disease. In the spirit of the day, I decided to get involved with a few other staff from CHD in the World AIDS day activities in Mombasa. CHD, as part of the Aga Khan Health Services which is a larger part of the Aga Khan Development Network joined forces with some other AKDN agencies (both development and for-profit) to create one AKDN team. Other agencies included Serena hotels, Jubilee insurance, and Aga Khan schools (its crazy just how big the AKDN really is and how many different industries it covers). The day began with a march through the streets of Mombasa from the provincial commissioners house to the Mombasa Municipal Stadium. It was a good turnout of a few hundred people, with AKDN, USAID, Afri-Aphya, VCT, and other agencies devoted to AIDS awareness. It was a scorching hot walk though with temperatures reaching 30 and above in the sun. Oh, and although we were marching through the narrow congested streets of downtown Mombasa, the streets themselves were not closed off to traffic so we marched in between and around cars, trucks, matatus and tuk-tuk’s. Is there any other way to parade?

Arriving at the stadium, we sat (in the shade thankfully) to hear speeches (in Swahili that I did not understand) and see skits/plays (which I also did not understand, but I don’t think anyone was really paying attention). Now, whats an event without some technical difficulties? See the stadium in Mombasa, is more of a field with some old concrete seats built into the grass surrounding the field. There’s actually no power in the stadium, so everything’s battery operated and of course, batteries ran out of juice. Meaning, microphones and speakers did not work. Ah well, c’est la Kenya. I couldn’t but notice and comment to my colleagues the absolute lack of attention that was being given to the speeches/performances. Makes me wonder what, if any, message got through.
Our next stop was to the streets. We had gathered boxes of bread, juice and clothing to distribute to street kids while we talked about AIDS awareness. We interacted with a group of about 50 street kids (most of whom had glue bottles stuck to their face). The unfortunate part is that the group was all male, which means that we didn’t get to interact with any females which to me is missing such a key group. After discussions the chaos ensued as we began distributing the goods we had brought. I was a little confused by the end of the day as to what exact impact we had made and whether we had really gotten the message across about HIV and AIDS. But then, after discussing with a friend, I realized that its not fair to judge the success of the day based on whatever standards (obviously developed in Canada) I may have. And to remember that, being in a society where AIDS is still highly stigmatized, perhaps the fact that the we marched through the streets, and just talked about it openly, basically the fact that event was actually held was a success in itself.