Its a little hard!

People are rough to each other. Mozambicans are some of the most friendly people I've ever come into contact with. But between themselves, they are brutal and won't trust you as far as they can through you. I guess this comes from the BRUTAL civil war that raged here for so long. But this morning was a test of my nerves. My housekeeper has been telling me about her sick brother. He was down in Maputo and she brought him back up here. She and I were talking about what was going on with him. Weight loss, loss of appetite, tiredness. They had gotten the malaria test. Negative. But the brother just kept getting worse. I mentioned an HIV test just to be sure. It's better to know than not! So I agreed to go with my housekeeper and her brother. With a white man in the hospital queue, you will not have to wait there all day. I agreed to have an AIDS test too. I'm at no risk so I figured why not.

As soon as I saw the brother I knew it was AIDS. He was skeletal. But we went. Of course it came back positive. I never thought I would have to experience, but it happens to a lot of us PCVs. It's not that experience that I hated, its the reaction when I got into work. But I quickly started talking to my housekeeper about how HIV is not a death sentence like it used to be. You can live 10-15 years with it if you REALLY take care of yourself. The brother is immediately offered counseling and they have taken him off to the provincial capital to get a CD4 count done. I went to work in a daze this morning. Mainly because I've seen this woman every day for the past 7 months and she was clearly upset and crying today. Luckily, she and I both turned out to be negative.

So I get into work and start asking around for material about living with HIV in Portuguese. All that I had at home in Portuguese was a nutritional book. I gave it to my housekeeper. But one of the guys here at work said to me after I mentioned that I had a horrible morning. "Oh that's nothing, you deal with it." He's insensitive, most likely has the virus himself but is some how right. Someone else here even laughed at my frantic reactions. That pissed me off, but I understood it too. Sympathy is not something shown very often here. That makes sense too when you look at life through an African perspective (something I'm not very good at.) Everyone suffered during the war, everyone suffers now. We all get through. The strength these people have is inspirational... but I guess when you don't really have a choice....