AIDS awareness is for everyone

By Maurice O. Ndole
The Collegian

Tomorrow is World AIDS Day in memory of the people who have died from AIDS and those living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The day may mean nothing to many people but for me it is a day to remember my relatives and friends who have died or infected by the disease.

But despite the holiday and numerous campaigns to fight the pandemic an unscientific poll around campus indicated that people perceive AIDS as a disease for gays, prostitutes and drug addicts.

Having been born and raised in Kenya, a country with a high HIV infection, my perception of AIDS is slightly different. To me, AIDS is not a disease for a select group of people but a disease that my family has encountered multiple times.

I first saw the effects of AIDS as a young boy. About six months after his wife died from AIDS in the late 80s, my uncle Ken started getting sick. The disease infected him during a time when the rate of infection was so low that some people questioned its existence and even made jokes about it. But it was not easy for those who were infected because the infection carried a stigma for the person and his family.

The disease tortured him.

I saw AIDS reduce my athletic, 6 foot 4, favorite uncle to a hunched frame of skin and bones that could barely walk. His eyes sank deep in the sockets and his usually rounded cheeks became gaunt revealing skeleton-like cheekbones. His dark brown skin turned ashy with patches of dead skin cells on various places. His brown eyes lost color and turned grayish, giving him a glassy look that I thought was scary.

He also suffered all kinds of ailments. Sores, which looked more like ulcers, appeared on his tongue and lips making it difficult for him to eat or speak. He kept his smile, though it looked forced and painful.

His deterioration made hospital workers afraid of taking care of him, forcing my mother, a nurse, to perform the bulk of the work needed to take care of him.

I didn’t understand much about his illness, maybe because I was too young, but from the look on my mother’s face whenever she came from visiting with him in the hospital, I knew it was serious. I was, however, optimistic that my uncle would somehow recover.

He never did.

His situation got worse. He became so skinny that it was hard to tell whether he was in the bed when he covered himself with a blanket because from a distance the spring hospital bed looked flat. But the irony was I still didn’t know the name of the disease that was killing my uncle. I had heard about AIDS but the idea of my uncle having AIDS was not even conceivable in my mind.

I got my first clue about his disease on the playground when a friend of mine asked me if my uncle had the terrible disease. I laughed it off but it bothered me that he would think my uncle had AIDS.

A few weeks later my father called a family meeting. He looked uncharacteristically sad. Throughout my uncle’s sickness he had not shown open sadness so I didn’t relate his sadness at the moment to my uncle’s condition. He was struggling to talk and I thought maybe a close relative had died. My perception was reinforced by my mother’s body language. She was seated on chair beside him, her head facing downwards – a sign I had learned to associate with the death of a close friend or relative.

Then came the words, this is about your uncle Ken, my father said. I could tell he has struggling to find the appropriate words but AIDS to be one of them.

Your uncle is very sick, he said. He has a disease called AIDS. He proceeded to tell us to use caution whenever we visited with him.

I don’t know why, but the news shocked me.

An awkward silence filled the room, there was no crying and after a moment everybody walked away to privately deal with the impact of news.

A few weeks later Ken died, leaving his two daughters orphans.

Research on AIDS is ongoing. A vaccine developed after Kenyan, British and American scientists discovered that some prostitutes in Nairobi were immune to the HIV virus is currently being tested in Kenya and South Africa.

But many people infected by the disease in poor countries still cannot afford to buy the medicine that can help sustain their lives. Pharmaceuticals manufacturing the drugs have been too slow to reduce the price for the drugs and help curb the spread of the disease.

But there is hope.

Former US president Bill Clinton has taken a leading role in ensuring infected people in developing nations receive medication at a cheaper price, through his humanitarian organization The Clinton Foundation. According to an article from CNN.com, Clinton has managed to broker a deal with pharmaceutical companies to cut the cost of HIV and AIDS drugs by more than 45 percent.

Such deals and research on the disease have given us hope for a cure. That cure would help others infected by the disease and I pray– a victory for my uncle’s spirit.

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