In Which I am Called Upon to Explain HIV/AIDS

Yesterday one of the other teachers asked me why AIDS is so much more of a problem in Africa than in America.  Well, because Africa was where it originated is the obvious answer.  Apparently this was news.  Public education fail.  This may also explain why I keep hearing conspiracy theories about how America engineered AIDS and introduced it to Africa.   There is also the point that HIV seems to have been introduced to America via the homosexual community, which is typically only around 5% of the population, so founder effect and all that.  But homosexuality is a touchy subject that I try to avoid unless I can divert the conversation into how we owe computers to a homosexual therefore we shouldn't hate (and/or kill) them.  The other thing I brought up was that there is a stigma against condoms and some people think that women who have condoms are automatically prostitutes.*

As it developed, this teacher friend of mine is shortly going to be hosting for some long period of time a woman living with HIV/AIDS.  He called her a victim, which I don't necessarily approve of, but he doesn't speak English well enough for me to want to argue semantics of implicit reductionism.  Besides which, his question was how to safely live with this lady.  My response was largely focused on how to not give her any germs if possible, don't share eating utensils, bathing water, etc.  With a side note of trying to make it clear that this is because he is worried about giving her opportunistic infections and not stigmatizing her (society does that quite well enough without help, alas).

I guess that was a reasonable response on my part.  I am not sure what else I should have should have said at that moment.  But it is in situations such as that that I worry that I am just not doing a good enough job of spreading the education and making the world a better place.

*side note, I doubt that a prostitute in Tanzania would make enough to afford condoms.  Sure condoms are cheap, but the volunteer who found himself in the very weird situation of having his coworkers take him to a brothel reported that the price was 2,000 TSH.  Typically when one encounters sex workers in bars (which is not an atypical experience here) they are underage girls with a price of 500 TSH.  For reference, $1 is usually somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 TSH.  A soda costs about 500 TSH, a meal of rice and beans is about 2,000 TSH. A typical laptop is 1,000,000 TSH.  I think a pack of condoms is 3,000 TSH and there is a condom company called Salama that advertises with the truly delightful slogan "kama kweli utampenda, utamlinda" which comes out in English, a little awkwardly due to English's lack of a gender neutral third person pronoun, "if you truly love someone, you will protect that person. "