South Africa’s AIDS epidemic is at its worst in high-risk subgroups like gay men, prostitutes, truckers, prisoners, miners and patients who don’t take their drugs regularly.
To have any hope of beating the epidemic, it must focus on such groups, experts say. Many pilot projects to do that have been started with aid from the United States government program called Pepfar. Here are some of them.
The Sex Workers Project
When she started as a nurse at the Sex Workers Project of the Wits Reproductive Health and H.I.V. Institute in Johannesburg, Maria Sibanyoni said, she could not understand why women sold sex.
“I thought, why don’t they work for a madam in a kitchen?” she said, referring to work as a domestic. But as she listened, she said, “they touched me in a big way, and now I love my job.”
The most moving story was that of a woman whose stepfather began raping her 16-year-old younger sister. When their mother refused to believe them, the girls ran away together, hitchhiking to Johannesburg. But every driver demanded money. When they ran out, the men demanded sex with the young beauty as payment.
Donald G. McNeil Jr.
New York Times
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