Special section tells of AIDS in Africa in personal terms

How can here and there exist at the same time on the same planet?

Here, we read those lines, written by reporter Paula Bock, in the Sunday newspaper at a time of giving thanks for life's blessings. There, in sub-Saharan Africa, 2.3 million people died of AIDS just last year, leaving countless children alone and at risk for the disease.

There is where the problem is, with 28.5 million people infected. Here is where some solutions are, with people working hard to at least slow the disease's spread.

These co-existing realities come together today in a special section by Bock and photographer Betty Udesen. "In her mother's shoes" is a story told in the most personal terms, the title a reference to Martha, one of some 11 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa.

From the outset, the reporter and photographer knew this was a story that could be told only by going into the lives of individuals experiencing it. The magnitude of 2.3 million deaths is too great to grasp.

Bock's story describes the number as "easier to calculate than to comprehend."

"I looked at that statistic and I never felt anything," she says.

"The numbers are so numbing," says Jacqui Banaszynski, editor of the section. "And any time you are dealing with massive numbers, those numbers themselves become a barrier to understanding."

So Bock and Udesen went to Zimbabwe, where as many as a third of the adults are infected with the HIV virus. Most are women. "We thought we would be focused on what it was like to live with the disease," the photographer recounts.

Almost immediately, though, they were in a different reality. They met 24-year-old Ruth, her two children, 4 and almost 6 years old, and Ruth's mother, who is called Amai Caty. The very next day Ruth was dead.

Her funeral was the eighth by midday. She is buried in a worn-out maize field that has become a vast and expanding cemetery, all of its graves dug in the past year.

"It's horrible. It's devastating," says Bock, who, even back here, is moved to tears at the recollection.

In the days that followed, Bock and Udesen were accepted into the circle of grieving family and friends. Such access is unusual because in the culture there, people do not talk about AIDS in their own lives. Even women who counsel others on the risks do not share in personal terms, but Bock and Udesen were told, "Take this back to America."

"We learned so much by being there," Udesen says. "There are conversations you can have sitting eye to eye with other women."

Bock says, "How can you not bond with a mother, a grandmother or a child?"

Sunday is World AIDS Day, and the timing of the section and its focus on women seem almost prophetic in light of a United Nations study released last week. It reported that for the first time women account for about half of all HIV-infected adults, 19.2 million of the 38.6 million sufferers worldwide.

"The face of AIDS has become that of a young African woman — seven of 10 people living with the disease are in sub-Saharan Africa, and 58 percent of infected Africans are female," a U.N. official told the Los Angeles Times.

It added: "Young women are especially hard-hit because of their lack of awareness of safe sex practices or ability to demand them, social vulnerability to older men and greater physical susceptibility to the virus, the report said."

Indeed, Bock's depiction of males' attitudes and behavior in Zimbabwe is shocking. "I had not expected that at all," she says.

I can't help wondering whether readers will ask why they should care about a problem 10,000 miles from here, when some attitudes there are so destructive. So I asked the reporter, the photographer and the editor why readers should care.

"Why should you not care just because somebody else doesn't? The effect is still the same. Martha still doesn't have her mother," Bock responded.

"We can, if we choose, isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, but should we if we benefit from so much of what the world has to offer? I don't think that's right," she said.

"I hope readers will care and think of people as more than a statistic. Where it goes from there is hard to say. How to help is a complicated question." Bock hopes readers will ask themselves "What does that move me to do?"

Udesen hopes at the very least, people will think about their own families' well-being, especially regarding conversations parents have with their children about the risk of AIDS.

Banaszynski offers three reasons why we all should care:

First is simple humanity — we should care what happens in the world. But for the accident of birth we could be there, instead of here.

Second, we must ask what problem we prefer to address, fighting AIDS or the destabilization of an entire continent.

Finally, different cultures act differently. "You can't hold it against people who grew up in a culture for living in that culture. People are trying to change, but working against huge forces of culture, history and politics."

The problem in Africa is how unequal the genders are, she adds. "I don't see men as the bad guy. I see the culture as a huge barrier. The hope is to give women more control over protecting themselves."

Which is the part of the story that comes back here to the Seattle area. "There are people just down the street trying to do something about this," Bock says.

By reading the section, you can learn about those people and other organizations working to combat HIV/AIDS. They are in a race against time and culture that is complex in societal terms but surprisingly simple at the personal level.

"I came to the conclusion personally that there is hope," says Banaszynski, who started writing about AIDS in 1981, when it was called Gay Related Immune Deficiency. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her story "AIDS in the Heartland" in 1988.

"We in this country pushed it back as a national health issue. We've shown that it doesn't have to be an out-of-control health epidemic," she says. "People have to change their behavior, and that's what happened here."

Perhaps it can happen there.

Inside the Times appears in the Sunday Seattle Times. If you have a comment on news coverage, write to Michael R. Fancher, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111, call 206-464-3310 or send e-mail to mfancher@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.