(The Capuchin, Winter 1989, pp. 5-6)
Among the countries most seriously affected by the AIDS crisis is Zambia. Although it is difficult to form an accurate estimate of the number of people affected, it can be said that every district hospital in the country admits perhaps three or four new cases a week. In some areas, the incidence is higher and it’s growing steadily.
When the disease first became evident a few years ago, people’s initial reaction was to deny it, to pretend it didn’t exist, to insist that the patient had died of something else altogether. However, bit by bit people came to face the issue more openly, and are now less reluctant than before to admit the truth of the situation. In many cases, although not all, the patient is told that he or she is suffering from AIDS and will not recover. After the initial shock, most people accept the bad news calmly, perhaps because they suspected it anyway, and were relived to be over the tension of wondering, ‘Have I got it?’
The Extended Family
As a developing country, Zambia is hard-pressed to provide medical care for routine problems, much less cope with the added burden of an increasing tide of patients who may need intensive nursing for up to a year. One tremendous asset which Zambia has in facing this problem is the extended family, that is, the relations, cousins, in-laws, grandparents and others who consider themselves to be one large family. People are accustomed to helping one another in time of need. This has been especially helpful in the AIDS crisis.
Let me give an example. A young woman who had gone to live in one of the big towns came back home to her own village near the mission where I live. She had been diagnosed as HIV positive, and a glance at her appearance showed that the disease was well advanced. The first time I saw her she was lying on a mat, asleep. I asked who the sick girl was, and was told, ‘That’s not a girl; she’s a married woman with two children.’ She had lost so much weight, and was so shrunken in appearance that I had taken her for a girl of 12 or 13. Her husband had ordered her out of the house when her case was diagnosed, illustrating the “unclean leper” mentality which people first showed when the disease came to be known.
‘We can’t just leave her’
Her nearest relatives were two elderly women whom I knew from seeing them at Mass on Sundays. They were distant aunts in European terms; in African terms, they were her “mother.” So they took her in and looked after her. They simply said, ‘We can’t just leave her.’ And so, for about six months until her death, they cared for her night and day, spoon-feeding her, bathing her, washing her clothes, lifting her up into a sitting position when she was able to sit, moving her from one side to the other, to ease the pain in bones almost entirely unprotected by flesh, and trying to encourage her in whatever way they could. If they felt any fear that they might contract the disease from her, they didn’t show it, and they are both alive and well today, about a year after her death.
Advice is Medicine
The AIDS crisis brings out the best in some people. In others, it reveals the short-sightedness, even the stupidity, of which human nature is only too capable. Although most adults know about AIDS, that has not yet motivated many of them to change their way of life. There are many who live promiscuously day by day, happily assuming that nothing will go wrong. They are like a driver who races his car at top speed on the wrong side of the road, without brakes, to see how far he can get before hitting something. Like the driver, the promiscuous may kill others in the process of learning their lesson.
The philosopher Hegel once said, in a cynical mood, that the only lesson to be learned from history is that people don’t learn any lessons from it. A more positive attitude exists among the Lozi people in Zambia. They have a proverb which says, ‘Advice is medicine; don’t despise it.’ Indeed, the only “medicine” for AIDS at present is advice, and the advice is: Keep the sixth commandment.