The Catholic center is a guest house in Mbeya at which most volunteers stay if they are in town. I spent the night there this past weekend for a going away event with the other volunteers. Outside the main office is a locked glass case containing books and crucifixes for sale. Not, alas, any of the crucifixes that have blinky red LEDs in them, which I have seen in country and really kind of want. Because I have no taste and I like blinky lights. Anyway, the titles for sale included Mixed Marriage (and based on the cover picture, they do indeed mean interracial marriage) and Nilinunua UKIMWI kwenye Baa [I Bought HIV/AIDS at the Bar.]
I had no idea that miscegenation was actually still a topic, though I suppose I should have guessed based on one of the horribly written low-production value Tanzanian films I've seen on a bus, which revolves around a man having an affair with a woman who turned out to have an affair with a white foreigner (which was discovered because the newborn was white, and apparently the filmmakers are unaware that black babies are often born very light-skinned) and this woman is scorned and stigmatized, though the cheating husband is still totally cool with everyone. He also threatens to beat all the women in his life, but that's just manly and without which women wouldn't respect him. Or something.
As far as buying HIV/AIDS goes, part of the stigma behind the disease is that supposedly it only comes from sex workers, who are also supposedly the only women who ever have condoms (see the flaw in this reasoning?). Way to discuss the topic in a fact-based and non-sensationalist way.
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