World AIDS Day

I cannot let World AIDS Day pass without some brief reflection.

Last week, as I stood talking with one of the workers at the seminary construction site, he looked down at a cut on his hand, and wiped the blood onto his pants.

In Canada, we are urged to be cautious around strangers' blood. Had I been administering first aid, the first step would have been to put on rubber gloves.

In Mozambique, where the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is 50 times that of Canada, people don't think about basic things like rubber gloves.

Mozambique is among the top 10 countries ranked by HIV/AIDS prevalence. The remaining 9 are Mozambique's sub-Saharan neighbours.

AIDS is a disease exacerbated by poverty. Poor mothers cannot afford the medication that would reduce the risk of transferring the disease to her children during birth. Even when they are given these medications, they often cannot afford the balanced and regular diet required to optimize the drugs' effectiveness.

And it's a disease that perpetuates poverty. Imagine a workforce in which one out of every 7 people has this one disease. Now imagine the number of additional people who miss work regularly in order to look after loved ones who are sick. And imagine the number of orphaned children who can no longer afford to attend school, starting their lives at a disadvantage.

We've seen homes where the head of the household is a 7-year-old child, struggling to be an adult.

Despite having lived in Mozambique for over four months, I have only experienced the ravages of this pandemic indirectly: through conversations about its impact, through advertisements, through stories.

This might partly be my fault, not having picked up on cultural cues. People sometimes refer to it ominously as, "the sickness." And rightfully so: it is the cause underlying one death out of every four here in Mozambique.

It has also driven the life expectancy rate down by 3 years since 1999. Here in Mozambique, people can now only expect to live to be 38 years old. And even that rate continues to fall.

Thankfully, I have not yet known anyone here to have died as a result of AIDS. That fact alone, perhaps more than any other, makes me a stranger in this land.