The Face of HIV/AIDS

It’s hard to make friends in a foreign country.  The culture is different, and when you live in a village not a lot of people speak enough English to have a real conversation with.  And above that, of those who do speak decent English it’s hard to get a real conversation going when you don’t have much in common.  About a month after moving to site I made a friend in my village.  She was a petite girl, about 25 years old, and was a student primary school teacher.  Our relationship started the strangest way: she came up to me one day in the village, introduced herself to me, and simply said, “I want to be your friend.”  And so we exchanged phone numbers and thus our friendship began.

Itumeleng (that’s her name) was an attractive friend to me because she spoke great English and she was one of the few people in my village who had something more than a high school education.  Every week she’d stop by my house after school and we’d talk a little bit.  I learned that she had a boy friend who had another girl friend and refused to break up with her, that her mother was very sick, and that she was helping raise her brother’s children.

A few weeks after meeting her she came to my house in the morning saying that she was not feeling well.  Her throat was bothering her and she needed money to go to town and see a doctor.  For whatever reason I trusted that she would return any money I borrowed her and gave her 20 rand.  And she did return the money.

The next week she came back saying that she had to go see the doctor again and asked to borrow 20 rand again.  I gave it to her and she returned it and when I asked her what the doctor said she shrugged her shoulders and said he had given her some medicine.

I didn’t see her again for some time.  The next time I saw her I was sitting in a taxi going to my camptown and she just happened to be in the taxi next to me.  She looked horrible; in fact, I barely recognized her.  I asked her how her health was, and she said it was better and that she was going in to town for some classes.  I also ended up seeing her when we were both heading back to village where my host mother saw her and exclaimed how she couldn’t recognize her from how much weight she had lost.

A few weeks later my host mother came to me and said that Itumeleng was very sick and was no longer going to school.  I went to visit her a few times at her house sometimes with my host mother, sometimes with out.  On one of those visits she told me that her sister has gotten her some medicine (it could have been traditional medicine from a witch doctor) to help her but it ended up making her feel worse.

About a month later my host mother came to me saying that Itumeleng was getting worse and that she needed to see a doctor in town.  She was going to give twenty rand to the family to help them with the costs and she asked if I would do the same and I did.  We saw her the next day to find out that the government hospital wanted to do a chest x-ray and they didn’t have one.  So she had come home with nothing to show for her trip.  A few days later my host mother asked if I could give money again to help pay for her to go to a private doctor and again I obliged.  I saw her the next day, and again the doctor hadn’t really said anything (which now I know can be typical of doctors here).  The strange thing was before going to her place my host mother started taking about taking pills, and how when someone has HIV/AIDS they should take their ARVs.  I didn’t really understand if my host mother knew Itumeleng had HIV, or she just assumed since she lost so much weight (which is a common assumption in Lesotho when someone drastically loses weight).  But my host mother gave her a similar speech when we went to visit.  That was the last time I saw her.

About a week later my host mother told me that Itumeleng had passed away that afternoon.  We went to her house where other villagers were also there.  The body was wrapped in a bed sheet and was on the floor and through the bed sheet you could see all her bones.  We waited there until a car from the funeral company came to take the body.  We sang some hymns, washed our hands, and went home.

Her funeral was a month later and when I talked to other villagers about her death everyone had a different theory.  My host mother told me that she had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS some time back and stopped taking her ARVs for some reason.  And, she told me, that when someone stops taking ARVs they get sick very quickly.  Another person told me that when she only got tested for HIV recently and by that time it was too late, taking ARVs would have done no good.

The reason I write this post at this time, when this all happened almost exactly a year back is that I just deleted her contact from my phone about a week ago.  I like to go through my phone contacts and delete anyone who I can no longer remember who they are and every time I passed by her name I did nothing until last week.  I can’t say she was a close friend, but I still wish she was still here.

One of the first things I learned about Lesotho is that it has one of the highest HIV rates in the world, almost 25%.  And in training we talked a lot about the numbers of HIV, prevalence in women versus men, number of children affected, and until Itumeleng’s death that’s all they were, numbers.  But now those numbers have a face and the honest truth is that it really doesn’t matter that 1 in 4 people are HIV positive because when it’s you that’s affected by it the only number that matters is 1.  One child born with HIV/AIDS is too much, one parent dying from HIV/AIDS too much, one friend lost is too much.

There’s no lesson to this story I’m sharing, nothing that I want you to take away, and at the moment I don’t wish to go in to the current state of HIV/AIDS in Lesotho.  I just wish to remember a friend, someone who had so much potential, and who left this world much to early.  R.I.P. Itumeleng Linale