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Chikwaka is literally not on the map. It sits along the main road to Mozambique, about 45 minutes east of Harare, Zimbabwe's bustling capital. When the Harare women with whom I was traveling (from the Women and AIDS Support Network) began to launch an HIV prevention project here, they had to hire a cartographer to map out the area. Juru, the "growth point" at Chikwaka's center, is on the map. It sprang up in the early- to mid-1980s, following independence, as a service depot for the hordes of men -- truck drivers, bus conductors, migrant workers -- who pass through on their way to and from Harare every day. Among Juru's attractions for travelers are a bottle store or two, a post office, a clinic, a motel and a nightclub. Chikwaka itself has pretty much one thing to offer these men: High school-age girls to meet at the nightclub and have sex with.

And so it turns out there were actually plenty of people around for the AIDS Day rally. But they were all high school students. And as they gathered in Juru that morning, preparing to march through town in defiant declaration that their bodies would no longer be one of the service depot's attractions, the traveling men had begun mingling among them. The teachers thought it best to hide their students inside the clinic until the empowering began.

Men in Zimbabwe who refuse to wear condoms during sex have a saying: "I don't take my sweets with the wrapper on." But with awareness about AIDS at an all-time high, these men know that wrapper-free sweets can kill them these days. So for many, such as these men in Juru, the answer is to have a girlfriend young enough to be relatively inexperienced when he finds her. "Of late, they have discovered these older women; they are now affected by this virus," explains Watson Mushaninga, a counselor at one of Chikwaka's schools. "So they are now going down to these ones, because they know that they are virgins."

Which creates a tragic irony. HIV can lie dormant for years, so if you don't get tested for it, you won't know you have it until you develop AIDS. And many of the men who think they are avoiding HIV by sleeping with young women -- probably around 30 percent of them -- are already positive. As a result, young women increasingly are too. New HIV testing centers in Zimbabwe's cities are finding that the virus is spreading fastest among two populations: Middle-aged men and women between 15 and 29 years old. There is no way of knowing how far HIV has actually spread in Chikwaka, or other rural communities like it. The closest place for a person to get an HIV test is in Harare (there are only five walk-in testing centers in Zimbabwe, all located in cities), and the notion of paying to take a bus to Harare just to get a test is laughable in Chikwaka. But given Harare's HIV infection rates, and the girls' testimony about Juru's male visitors and their passion for condom-free sex, there's little doubt HIV is steadily creeping forward among this community's youth.

There are more than 22 million people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, which is two-thirds of the world's total HIV infections. Southern Africa is in the worst shape. The four countries with the highest HIV infection rates in the world are in the region -- Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, all with anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of their adult populations believed to be HIV positive. Zimbabwe leads the world, with as many as 70 percent of women tested at prenatal clinics in certain areas HIV positive.

International health experts warn that the catastrophe unfolding in Africa is everybody's problem. Dr. D.A. Henderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's department of epidemiology and international health, directed the global small pox eradication campaign. He says the world should learn from history's viral epidemics that national borders are porous when it comes to infectious diseases. He remembers when there were only about 50 cases of malaria a year in the United States; today there are around 1,000.

"We have now a far more mobile population than we've had before," he warns. "So if we are talking strictly from the health standpoint in the U.S., it is clearly in our best interest to be involved."

Over the course of the last year, the world's policy makers have begun to tune in to such warnings. At the Clinton administration's prompting, the United Nations Security Council convened to discuss Africa's epidemic on Jan. 10 -- a stunning first-ever Security Council meeting on a health matter. In an address to the gathering, Vice President Al Gore announced the administration's proposal for a $150 million boost in U.S. spending on global AIDS programs next fiscal year. If ultimately approved by Congress, the funding boost would be the largest in U.S. history for global AIDS programs. Whether or not Chikwaka's students will notice is another question. The United Nations estimates the price tag just for effective prevention programs in Africa is around $1.3 billion.

The explanations for why Africa has been hit so disproportionately hard by this virus are certainly manifold, and far too complex to pin on any one villain. But Chikwaka's story reveals at least one clear culprit. For, ultimately, this virus is about sex. More directly, in Africa, it's often about predatory, unequal and unsafe sexual relationships that breed disease.

Next page | "If you can’t touch this person you are having sex with, how do you start telling him, 'Wear a condom'?"