“Large-scale treatment is no longer a fantasy. The challenge is to do it rationally.” That quote from the director of UNAIDS gets at the gist of the article in this week's Newsweek that I contributed to.
Over the course of last week, NW took what it wanted from my reporting and sent the rest off to the graveyard of irrelevant observations. This week, some of the more salient discarded bits rise back up, and shuffle zombie-like onto the Johnnyblog.
There are issues to discuss about how the program works, and how it awards these drugs to some people and denies it to others. But today’s zombie material is just going to focus on one gutcheck moment from the week’s reporting: my conversation with Ronnie, who gets a passing mention as the brother and responsiblility of 18-year-old center-of-article's-lede Henry.
I've known two dozen depressed kids, but I never met one that was despondent like Ronnie. He sat on a bench at the pediatric clinic at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, staring quietly at his shoes while gregarious Henry kept hammering home his we-can-beat-this philosophy. Ronnie is HIV+, his mother is dead, and his dad left the family.
“Ronnie’s father is not dead. He is with another lady,” Henry says. “So now I am the head of the family.” Ronnie sat silent while his half-brother explained how Ronnie had to move schools because teachers and students ostracized him for being HIV+.
Ronnie would make eye contact if you move into his line of vision. His answering voice sounds like it scrapes a wounded nerve every time he uses it. Do you know anyone you can talk to about HIV? No. Do you wish you could talk to someone about HIV? Yes.
Henry smiled and said that Yes, now he knows that Ronnie needs to talk about HIV more. But it didn't seem like an epiphany had really come to Henry: it sounded like he was telling the visitors what they wanted to hear. Ronnie's life is likely to stay mean and isolated, even though he's got his family. They don't want to talk about his problem, and his disease fills him with such shame that he seems to want all mention of it to just go away. He's not likely to understand what HIV is any time soon, except to know it's a curse that adults don't want to talk about.
No great wider message today. I just wanted you all to know about Ronnie, and I wanted to write about him.
