The+link+between+HIV-AIDS,+poverty+and+sex+in+SA,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 24 April 2006
=HIV/AIDS: facing up to the link between poverty and sex in SA=


 * Jonny Steinberg**

LAST month I interviewed a 26-year-old health worker from the old Transkei town of Lusikisiki. I shall call her Nomaswazi. She was telling me that many of the girls she treats for sexually transmitted infections are as young as 14.

“School finishes at two in the afternoon,” she commented, “and the girls start coming into the clinic at 2.30pm. They come straight from school.”

I wanted to know whether these girls were having transactional sex, and I framed my question thus: “Is it because they are poor, and they struggle to get money and food at home? Is sex a means of income?” “Yes,” she replied, “but why do you use the word ‘they’? Let’s rather talk about me, Nomaswazi, because I am also a young woman from a poor home.”

She told me that she matriculated in 1997 and had a baby in 1998.

“There was no work in Lusikisiki. Not even a hope of a job. Nobody was employed at home. I could not stay. My mother kept my child with her and sent me to stay with my aunt in Umtata.

“She thought maybe there is more opportunity there. But it was just as bad as Lusikisiki,” she said. “Although my aunt was very determined. She I said I must get a job. She forced me out of the house every morning, and I was not allowed to come back until late. She was very strong.”

On the streets of Umtata, Nomaswazi bumped into an old high school friend whom she told about her predicament.

“My friend said: ‘Come, we will find you a job.’ She took me to stay with her in a new RDP area, and I found out what she meant by having a job. It meant having many boyfriends. It meant going to a place and meeting a man there, and having him buy you clothes and food for the few months your relationship lasted.”

“What did your aunt say?” I asked.

“My aunt said nothing, my mother too. They are poor. They do not know where the food will come from tomorrow. You arrive home with a packet full of meat. They cannot ask you where you got these things because you are helping them.”

After 18 months of this life, Nomaswazi left Umtata and returned to Lusikisiki. “I didn’t know how to deal with all these boyfriends,” she told me, “so I stopped. I sat unemployed in my mother’s house for two years before I got this job. There were times I thought I’d go mad.”

Several things struck me about Nomaswazi’s story. It tells us powerfully why AIDS prevention work is so difficult; indeed, why much of it fails.

Nomaswazi lived 18 months of her life at great risk, and yet what is it AIDS prevention work could have told her she didn’t already know? Her problem was not a lack of education. She knew exactly how HIV is transmitted. She did not need reminding that she was taking her life in her hands.

Nor was her problem poor self-esteem, a lack of agency, or a confused or damaged identity. On the contrary, she was exercising her agency in the only way available to her: she was putting food on her family’s table the only way she could.

AIDS prevention work which assumes the problem lies in the psyches of women like Nomaswazi is doing no good at all. It patronises her, misunderstands her, diagnoses her with a malaise she does not have. The architects of such prevention work have drugged themselves with the consoling belief that the epidemic can be beaten if only young people stride into the world filled with knowledge, dignity and self-belief.

They fail to understand that for an entire generation of poverty-stricken South African women, the line between love and financial transaction has blurred. Their predicament is neither chosen, nor a symptom of weak character: it is built into the structure of their lives.

I put this to Nomaswazi: “You can ‘educate’ them until hens grow teeth, but teenaged girls will still seek livelihoods through sex, just as you did.”

“Many of them will,” she replied. “But there are still things I can do for them. I can tell them a little about persuading a man to wear a condom, and I can show them to recognise the signs of illness early, when to go to a clinic, how to look after themselves. That it is the very least I can do.”


 * Steinberg is a freelance writer.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A189733**

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