Aids and Faith in Zimbabwe
Kristen Ashburn
Contact Press Images
Winner of the 2004 Canon Female Photojournalist Award
Zimbabwe is in crisis. Thirty-five percent of the population is HIV-positive; seventy percent is unemployed; and essentials like corn flour, cooking oil, sugar and gasoline are nearly impossible to obtain. Ruled by strongman Robert Mugabe since 1980, the country has devolved from the hope of post-colonial Africa into a ruthless police state, with Mugabe personally ordering the curtailment of political dissent and press freedoms. The daily private newspapers have been closed. Foreign journalists who manage to obtain credentials to work in the country face heavy restrictions and are carefully watched. Those who work without credentials face a two-year jail sentence if caught. In the newest strategy to eradicate potential opposition, Mugabe initiated Operation Murambatsvina (“drive out the rubbish”), attacking the nation’s poor across the country. Shantytowns, legitimate housing developments and small businesses have been demolished to force already impoverished urban refugees into the countryside.
Preview
The combination of extreme poverty and state-sponsored human rights violations adds incalculable strain and peril to the daily existence of those infected with HIV. Though medication is sometimes available, AIDS sufferers in need of treatment face a nearly insurmountable hurdle: paying for them. The result is a brutal choice: buying food for their families, or buying drugs to remain alive. Thus abandoned by authorities who view them as more suspect than sympathetic, poor and with medicine out of reach, it is the spirit that must carry them. This is not to say that Zimbabwe’s HIV population finds answers in God, but religion and its customs do bring some measure of comfort. Coming together as a community, with others likewise trapped by poverty and illness, is an antidote to one of the tragic side-effects of AIDS: loneliness. Neighbors and extended families are also finding redemption in tending the spirits of the sick. One woman who volunteers her time caring for AIDS patients conveyed it to me this way in an interview: "Look out my window. You see that small plot of land. You see this two-room house? We are poor. We are a family of four and my husband is the only one who works. He makes a hundred dollars a month to support us all. I volunteer my time with people because they need me. I will not get paid in this life but God is watching. He sees what we’re doing."
