Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
narrow, muddy streets with open sewers on either side, I remembered Matthias's declara-
tions of the day before. Palms and orchids grew wonderfully out of the heaps of shit. Goats
bleated from doorways and the occasional cow would munch without care on a piece of
car tyre. All the while, reggae blared out of the barber shops and all-day drinking dens. It
was, I decided, like an even unhealthier version of Sodom and Gomorrah.
We reached the orphanage soon after. A collection of wooden huts with tin roofs were
filled with dormitory beds, each housing three or four children apiece. A classroom con-
sisted of a tin roof with some scaffold holding it up, and there was - to my surprise - a
neat little garden where sweet potato and beans grew. As Moses showed us around, some
of the children were digging. 'It's the holidays,' he said, 'so they must work. It's the only
way I can feed them all.'
Moses led us into a small hut. On the walls a poster warned against sin and the evils
of fornication. 'Abstinence is the way of the Lord!' declared one. 'Jesus loves those who
avoid the sins of the flesh,' read another. They seemed righteous and perhaps even back-
ward to my Western eyes, and Boston snorted at their mention of God, but they all made
sense against the third poster we saw. 'HIV is Real!' it declared, simple and stark.
'There was a census done, ten years ago,' Moses began. 'Of a hundred people, only
eight were reported to be HIV negative. This is where AIDs came from. The first reported
case in Uganda was right here, on this very street. It was a woman called Nafakeero. She'd
gone to Tanzania to trade in the markets at Kanyigo, and when she came back she fell very
ill. The weight fell off her.'
'It's because of the hookers here,' Boston suddenly interjected. 'All these fishermen,
they do nothing but fish and fuck, fish and fuck. All day long. No wonder they all have
AIDS. I can smell it in the air.'
'Boston,' I said, with a stare that he understood to mean, 'Shut up!' In spite of his in-
sensitivity, though, he did have a point. When landing sites like Kasansero sprang up to
take advantage of the lake, the effect was of a gold rush. Fishermen flocked here, leaving
their families behind, and so did businesses who could take advantage of the new popu-
lations. Traders, tinkers, barbers and restaurateurs came - and, so, too did the prostitutes.
When I had asked the fishermen I was out with what they spent their money on, 'Ladies'
seemed to be the general consensus.
'The fishermen I was out with on the lake, they talk about it like it's malaria or flu.'
'That is one of our biggest problems,' said Moses. 'After Nafakeero, it spread around
Uganda like wildfire - and all because we dismissed it.'
I wondered if, in a continent that has faced up to and found a way to live with the con-
stant threat of malaria and other tropical diseases, it was easier to dismiss AIDS as 'just
another illness' than it was in the West. But Moses had other explanations. 'At the time,'
he explained, 'people blamed it on witchcraft. They said those afflicted must be cursed. In
