Living with death in Mozambique

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 19:33:00 +0000

As dusk turns to darkness, a group of women wait in the shadows, eyeing a boldly lit truckers' bar. Here at the crossroads, road-weary long-haul drivers stop for the night, heading for the bars in search of beer and women. Most nights, Inchope's female entertainers enter with guitars, tambourines and sexual come-ons. But tonight, they come carrying condoms, and the songs they sing are about preventing the spread of AIDS.

In this beautiful, beleaguered African country of 19 million, nearly 2 million people, or one in eight, are HIV-positive -- among the highest rates of infection in the world. Along the Beira Corridor, Mozambique's main commercial conduit, local infection has risen to catastrophic levels -- above 24 percent. In the bars and clubs clustered along the road, the HIV virus is passed from truckers to prostitutes and back to other truckers, and then on to family members.

Having survived brutal colonial rule, floods and famine, and a 16-year civil war, Mozambicans now find themselves ravaged by AIDS. The pandemic has hit sub-Saharan Africa harder than anywhere on the planet, a fact underscored when U.S. President George W. Bush, during his trip to Africa last week, urged South African president Thabo Mbeki to take more aggressive steps to fight the disease. As denial and bureaucratic red tape block aid and action, citizens' groups like Inchope's sex workers are playing an increasingly important role in the struggle to prevent the HIV virus from spreading.

The war against nurses

Fri, 27 Jul 2001 20:23:00 +0000

For registered nurse Jessica Berger, it was a "normal" morning shift at the high-risk psychiatric unit in Quincy, Mass., where she worked: just three staff members, including herself, responsible for the entire floor. Once again, Berger found herself assigned to a patient held at the facility after threatening to kill his girlfriend. During previous nights, he had raised a blanket over his head, capelike, mimicking "Dracula." He had also made menacing sexual comments toward Berger, and refused to sleep while she was on shift.

Although Berger told her supervisor she was concerned the patient might attack her, her fears were dismissed. Instead she was told to escort him to a smoking room at the dead end of an isolated corridor.

"I was opening the door when he threw a blanket over my head and bashed me against the wall," Berger recalls. "He had me on the ground, pummeling me and smashing my face into the floor." She screamed, but no help came. The patient began strangling her. "That's when I started to say the Lord's Prayer," says Berger. Just as she was about to lose consciousness, another patient -- a schizophrenic who'd been locked in his room for weeks -- came to her rescue. "Otherwise," Berger says, "I'd be dead."

Salon.com > Diana Reiss-Koncar

Living with death in Mozambique

The war against nurses