More Than Eyes Can See E-Book

Rhidian Brook

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Sent by the Salvation Army to bear witness to the work they were doing in response to the Aids pandemic, Rhidian Brook, his wife and two children, follow a tril of devastation through communities still shattered and being broken by the disease. He met truck stop workers in Kenya, victims of rape in Rwanda, child-headed families in Soweto, children of prostitutes in India. A remarkable journey amongst the infected and the affected through a world that, despite seeming on the brink of collapse, is bein held together, not by power, politics, guns and money, but by small acts of kindness from people living with more hope than chance of surviving AIDS and HIV.

Leseprobe

MORE THAN EYES CAN SEE

A nine-month journey through the AIDS pandemic

by

Rhidian Brook

For Gabriel and Agnes, who made it possible to see much more.

‘Write my name somewhere.’

Pascal Kyengo

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Author’s Note

The Road Was Red

Going Where It’s Darkest

‘Where Are All the Sick People?’

‘Aspire To Inspire Before You Expire’

Sex In Church

Whilst On Our Way Somewhere More Important

‘Lovin’ Human Connection’

Major Randive and the Prostitutes

The Needle and the Damage Done

‘Just Like In That Movie’

Où Est Le Docteur?

In the Field of a Thousand Orphans

Intermission

The Boy in the Photograph

‘Write My Name Somewhere’

Miracle in Machakos

The Economics of Love

A Short History of Care

The Smoke That Thunders

Who’s the Daddy Now?

Blood For Money

Servants and Stars

And the Way Out?

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Copyright

Prologue

‘Only connect’ – E. M. Forster

This book has unusual provenance. It was someone else’s idea and only one part of a much bigger idea at that. It came my way via a long, serendipitous chain of human connections set in motion by a woman who lived ten thousand miles away…

In the Autumn 2003, Nikki Capp, a Melbourne mother of two, member of the Salvation Army and part-time employee of drug company GlaxoSmithKline was troubled by a big subject and a needling question: HIV/AIDS and what are you going to do about it? As a corporate affairs manager for GSK (who made the antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) taken by HIV/AIDS patients) and through her own awareness of the Salvation Army’s HIV/AIDS work, she was often stepping into the penumbra of the pandemic’s shadow. She was part of two monolithic – almost antithetical – organisations, linked by the common ground of HIV/AIDS.

One night, she had what she called a ‘waking dream’ in which she saw five people sitting around a table: herself; the General of the Salvation Army; JP Garnier (the then global head of GSK); her husband Nick (who worked for a micro-financing organisation); and Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation. The people around the table were having a conversation about HIV/AIDS.

By her own reckoning Nikki was ‘a nobody’ in both GSK and the Salvation Army but she interpreted this dream as a commission to get to the tops of these organisations, orchestrate a meeting between them and pitch the idea of them working together to address the global HIV/AIDS issue. For the next two years, she set out to persuade these VIPs to take seats at the table of her dreams. She already had one vital connection to an Australian doctor called Ian Campbell, the head of the Salvation Army’s International Health Services and something of a seminal figure in HIV/AIDS response work; and there were openings, through her own and her husband’s work, to GSK and the world of micro-finance. But the journey was not a straightforward stroll through a line of open doors; there was much scepticism, some scoffing and a number of nearly-but-not-quite encounters that required doggedness, a ‘truck load of faith’, and ‘constantly telling myself that I wasn’t crazy’. After two years it was just about possible to imagine reserving at least three of the seats at the envisioned table. The elephant not in the room was Murdoch.

Nikki’s mentor at that time was the retired former head of the Salvation Army, General Eva Burrows – a legend in Salvation Army circles – and a woman who, in her role as world leader of the Army, had made powerful friends. One such friend was Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the mother of Rupert Murdoch.

Despite her age (ninety), Dame Elisabeth was sharp on events and a great champion of the ‘Salvos’ (as the Salvation Army were known in Australia); she was happy to meet Nikki to talk about such an important issue. Nikki travelled to Dame Elisabeth’s house outside Melbourne and after a drive around the grounds in the dame’s buggy, she began to explain what she thought she was trying to bring about. She felt, as she often did telling people about her dream, ‘like a total idiot,’ but Dame Elisabeth saw meaning in the peculiarity. She took Nikki’s materials – detailing the nature of the Salvation Army’s worldwide HIV/AIDS response – and a letter requesting a meeting with her son. She wrote ‘Rupert’s’ home address on an envelope and handed it to Eva so that she could write to him personally. ‘When he sees my handwriting, he’ll open the letter.’

Months passed and Nikki was again wondering if her idea was a dream too far when, in January 2004, she received a message through Eva Burrows that Murdoch was willing to meet her. That April, the media mogul gave ‘the woman from Melbourne who had had a dream’ as much time as he usually allotted to world leaders. As she stepped over the threshold of the News Corp building, Nikki recalled the line she’d read from the Book of Esther and that she’d written in her diary months ago as an encouragement: ‘…who can say but you have been elevated to the palace for just such a time as this?’

The king of News Corp was gracious and practical; he expressed genuine concern for the HIV/AIDS situation and he was struck by the nature of the Salvation Army’s response to the pandemic. He indicated his willingness to bring News Corp to the table to discuss how the four proposed partners might do something together. He said he would nominate someone in his organisation to help Nikki explore ways of developing a partnership. A meeting was actioned for the Autumn in London.

In November 2004, Nikki and Dr Ian Campbell met with James McManus, the head of TSL education, Nigel Hawkins the Health Editor of The Times – who had a particular expertise in HIV/AIDS – and Simon Willis, a managing director at the TSL group.

Nikki and Ian had talked about what they wanted to say beforehand. ‘In our heads it sounded good: statistics about HIV/AIDS and poverty didn’t drive action; but stories and real life experience did. By helping people experience that, maybe in some way we might move them to act. We wanted them to help us help “the man in the street” realise that people living in poverty have the same aspirations, dreams, resilience and innate capacities to survive and to prosper, as does anyone living in a wealthy country and that understanding this was a key part of our response to HIV/AIDS.’

But what sounded worthy and good in their heads sounded confused and imprecise when pitched. Salvationists use a lot of jargon and have a predilection for acronyms (they are an army after all). If the substance of the work was deep the describing of it was flat. As Ian Campbell began to talk about local ‘facilitators’ and ‘motivators’, Community Counselling, Income Generating Activities (IGAs) and Psycho Social Support (PSS) activities, the eyes of the corporate-speak-savvy executives began to glaze over. After hearing them out, James McManus raised a finger: half Salvation Army salute (pointing to heaven); half ‘Please stop!’

‘This is great – the work sounds wonderful and we want to help – but I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.’

Ian and Nikki’s hearts sank. All this treasure but no easy way of sharing it.

‘That’s our problem,’ Nikki said. ‘We need someone to help us put the deeds into words.’

It was then that Simon Willis suggested the idea of writing a book. It wasn’t the full realisation of the dream, but Nikki felt that perhaps it was a part of it. They began to discuss how, who, when and where. ‘Immersion in different communities around the world in different continents,’ ‘drawing up alongside the infected and the affected.’ Dr Campbell and Nikki knew some good people in the field who might be able to ‘facilitate the collecting of stories’.

James McManus put up an interventionist finger again.

‘There is no way you or anyone in your organisation can write this book. You have to find someone else to write it; to “facilitate the collecting the stories”, as you put it. “Do you know anyone who might want to do that?”’

…Just when you think you’re in the middle of your own story – playing the main role, speaking your familiar lines, going through your habitual motions – you find yourself part of someone else’s story; a story that has been going on for some time and in which you have a small role to play.

Author’s Note

This is an account of a journey I made with my wife Nicola and our two children, Gabriel and Agnes, between January and September 2006, to the heart of places affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

The task has fallen to me to write about what I saw and I can’t entirely – nor would I dare – speak for my family. But because we were together 24 hours a day, seven days a weeks for nine months, there were moments when we became an eight-eyed, eight-legged creature, seeing and experiencing things as one. For this reason I occasionally switch from the singular ‘I’ and ‘me’ to the collective ‘we’ and ‘us’.

It was unusual to send a whole family on a journey like this. The fact it happened this way is, in part, down to the inspiration and insight of the Salvation Army AIDS response team who knew already how much deeper we might go if we went as a whole family; but it was also due to my family’s intrepid and naturally curious personalities; and their willingness to take a risk. And I am hugely glad they came with me. Apart from not being able to cope with the loneliness, I am not sure I would have got access to situations and acceptance from people to the degree that we did had I been a writer travelling solo.

I have recorded the journey in the order we made it rather than trying to keep to a strict geographical taxonomy. Largely for reasons of climate and convenience, we decided upon a route that started in Africa, in the community of Kithituni, Kenya; then, to avoid the sapping heat we went to India – to Mumbai, Satara, Mizoram and Calcutta – in February; and back to Kenya, on to Rwanda and Uganda, before heading south to Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. We then crossed the ocean and several latitudes to Hong Kong and Mainland China before finishing the working part of the journey in the United States, in Los Angeles.

The common thread in this seemingly random selection of cities and countries was that they were all places severely affected by HIV/AIDS where the Salvation Army had a presence. The confluence of these two things determined our choice of destination and provided the raison d’être for this venture and this book. Before I was about to embark on writing this book I found myself envying those authors who decide upon a focused geography – like Siberia, Patagonia or Route 66 – and then write about it. Our route was on the map but its unifying, thematic characteristic was not topographical, lingual, political or economic; it was epidemiological, and the cause and effects of this particular disease weren’t always easy to see. HIV/AIDS lead us to places, subjects and themes we hadn’t necessarily planned on visiting (and worthy of whole books in their own right); so, if occasionally I step off the designated road, I hope that the reader won’t be thrown or disappointed. In picking up and following the blood red thread of this disease we often found it entwined with other threads that made up a larger, complex tapestry in which many issues overlapped and bled into each other.

Commissioner Hezekial Anzeze – the executive leader of the Kenyan Salvation Army – told us to expect this. He said: ‘You are on a hunt for a particular animal. While you are on this trail, you will come across the trails of other animals and want to follow them, too. And so you should, because they are part of the hunt. The difficult thing is that the animal you are after is elusive and difficult to find because it is hidden most of the time; you will sometimes feel that this animal does not exist because it can’t always be seen. But it is there. You just have to look with more than your eyes.’

Rhidian Brook

London, May 2007

The Road Was Red

At first, the road was red and our shadows were short. Our feet were our transport and conversation our sustenance. The road we were walking sometimes wound out of sight for a while before rising again into view and cutting through the distant hills. The people used the road to meet with bosses and brothers, get to water pumps and rendez-vous with lovers. The road was vein and artery, carrying the freight of human endeavour to and from the cities, towns, villages and communities. It was an innocent conduit for the transport of material goods and simple kindnesses, as well as a benign passage for the deadly disease we were tracking. Sometimes the road changed from red dust to jet macadam and the transport from foot to bike to bus to sleek sedan; but it made no difference: the best of routes only served to carry the worst of cargo more quickly.

Eventually we had to come off the road because it wasn’t the road we needed to follow; it was the people on the road, going back to their huts and shambas, church meetings, community conversations, bars and brothels. For these were the places where HIV/AIDS had its formation. This pandemic had not spread via some sinister plot or random mosquito bite; but through the most basic and intimate kind of human transaction. Just as this pandemic had its roots in relationships so it was possible to find its antidote wherever one or two were gathered.

In January 2005, I took the first wavering steps on this road as I walked to the International Headquarters of the Salvation Army in Blackfriars to a meeting to discuss whether I would be willing to write a book documenting the Army’s response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. I had actually decided that I would not be taking up the potential commission. I was going along out of deference to my wife Nicola (who thought we should do it) and politeness to the Salvation Army and my friend Simon Willis (who had suggested my name to them in the first place). As I walked across the Millennium Bridge towards the International Headquarters of the strange, idiosyncratic organisation I knew little about beyond the clichés of brass bands and comforting cuppas, I paced out my mini mantra for not going:

Career, ignorance, family, health.

In that order.

Any one of these objections provided a sound enough reason not to go; their aggregate seemed conclusive. I thought I was clear on this but as I got closer to the scripture-embossed, glass-fronted building, I felt my resolve swaying like the aluminium construction beneath me. By the time I was close enough to read the words of the one I claimed to follow, written in lazered-glass across the entrance – ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will have the light of life’ – my mind was a fog of indecision.

I had been reading a book called In Darkest England and the Way Out, written in the main by the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth. Published in 1891, it is a summation of Booth’s beliefs and observations about what was wrong with the world (England) and what he hoped to do about it. It had an energy, anger and authority which was breathtaking; but what set this book apart from other rants about what is wrong with the world was its lived criticism, its practicality and its prescience: it didn’t just dwell on the malady, it offered a remedy – a set of remedies in fact, many of which were scoffed at at the time but have since become a reality: a citizens advice bureau; women’s enfranchisement; shelter and food for the homeless; work for the out of work; and some that are just coming into being: the travelling hospital; a poor man’s bank; co-operative, organic farms. This was the work of a man who was not a philosopher or social engineer theorising from behind his desk about the iniquities of life whilst offering no way out; it was the thinking of a man who had clearly engaged with the worst that the world and mankind had to offer and who believed there was something that could be done about it. The title of the book – In Darkest England and the Way Out – was an arresting counterpoint to the then hugely popular In Darkest Africa, Henry Morton Stanley’s account of his (ultimately murderous) exploration of that continent. England was then febrile for tales of adventurers cutting a swathe through the thick jungle of unchartered lands, tales that mixed excitement and wonder with dread and horror, all wrapped up in a safe sense of superiority. Booth’s point was that you don’t have to go that far – to Africa – to find the dread and horror when it was right here on your doorstep.

Were he here now, Booth might be amazed to see how much his country had dragged ‘the submerged tenth’, as he called it, from the gutter; grateful too, to learn that the citizens of this country enjoyed some of the benefits that he once proposed. But he’d have been appalled by the new statistics that were shaming our civilisation. That ‘submerged tenth’ of England had been replaced by a submerged two-thirds out in the world, beyond these sorted shores in the countries that we had once claimed to ‘discover’. If some of the old, world-wrecking diseases had gone away they had been replaced by new afflictions, like HIV/AIDS, that were killing people on an even greater scale and, as always, it was the poor who were taking the full force of it.

Booth was particularly exacting with the Church of his day; keen to separate out the respect-obsessed, cultural Christians from true followers; he hated the former’s lukewarm commitment, their smugness and disregard for those being crushed by the world. In his book he wrote: ‘in the struggle of life the weakest will go to the wall, and there are so many weak. The fittest, in tooth and claw, will survive – all that we can do is to soften the lot of the unfit and make their suffering less horrible than it is at present. Is it not time that they (the Church) should concentrate all their energies on a united effort to break this terrible perpetuity of perdition and to rescue some at least of those for whom they profess to believe their founder came to die?’

I was a supposed believer, like Booth, in a redemptive plan; someone who really does see the Church, at its best, as central to that plan; and that it’s the poor and the lost who we are called to serve; but I was walling myself behind the accepted, sensible reasons for not going on a journey like this and greying my argument with another excuse masquerading as modesty: ‘the world is full of enough do-gooders; what difference can you make anyway?’

If I was looking for omens to reinforce my stance, I was in the wrong bit of town. Just outside the headquarters, a man was selling copies of The Big Issue. When the editor of that magazine – John Bird – was asked what advice or wisdom he could pass on to people wanting to do something about the state of the world he said: ‘Keep asking the naïve questions: “Why are there so many poor people in the world? What are you doing about it?’”

I sidestepped the man selling the magazine and walked into the International Headquarters of Booth’s Army building for my meeting. Minutes later I was seated around a table with six people involved with the Salvation Army’s response to HIV/AIDS including their International Health Consultant, Dr Ian Campbell, his wife Alison and Sue Lucas, a consultant to UN/AIDS. Dr Campbell, started to outline the nature of the job and what would be required.

‘We’d like someone to see for themselves what it’s like; someone ready to live within these communities long enough to feel the loss, the grief, the breakdown of social structures and get close enough to hear and see what people are doing to overcome the problem; someone able to find the stories of hope in the midst of seemingly overwhelming despair. It won’t be easy or always comfortable, they’ll see things they won’t believe and won’t want to believe. But the best way – the only true way – for this person to be a witness is for them to be there.’

I ventured my ignorance, suggesting that there were surely people more expert than me who could take on the job.

‘The world of HIV/AIDS has enough experts,’ he said. ‘We don’t want a statistician or a specialist, we just want someone to go and see it and find the stories. Go expecting to learn and you will find the story.’

‘What is the story?’

‘This thing has its formation through relationships – people searching for belonging or significance; and it’s through relationships that people can find a solution to this pandemic. But to see this you have to be there. Get your hands dirty. Smell it. Live it. You will have to immerse yourself for a considerable time.’

(His neutral ‘someone’ had become the assumptive ‘you’.)

‘How long will it take?’

‘Nine months to a year.’

‘What about my family, my wife and two children?’

‘Take them with you. Where you’re going being a family will be an asset.’

I shook my head. Not to say no, but at the sorry sight of my sensible reasons not-to-go evaporating into the ether.

The doctor then looked at me, fixed me with his blue eyes, and asked:

‘Can you think of a good reason why you wouldn’t do it?’

Going Where It’s Darkest

A year later, I set off with my family on a nine-month journey that would take us to eleven countries in three continents – into the very heart of the AIDS pandemic.

The night before going we had looked at my son’s atlas and circumnavigated the world with our fingers. Between the familiar world maps showing Temperature, Population and Religion, were the new maps charting recent human concerns: Environmental Issues, Travel and Tourism; there was also a map showing the percentage of adults living with HIV/AIDS. Where once I had looked at a world that was colonial pink, my children were now staring at a world shading from lilac to deep violet, indicating the spread and depth of a pandemic. But for a pure white Australia and Scandinavia the whole world was under a purple shadow.

I traced our intended route with my finger, starting in lavender Britain, scratching a course south to amethyst Kenya. Across to mauve India; then back to the artichoke heart of Africa – Rwanda and Uganda – before plummeting south into the puce of Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Two ocean spanning finger strides took us to the controlled lilac of China and the USA, before my nail traced a line full circle back to England and home.

‘We’re mainly going where it’s darkest,’ Gabriel said.

For the next nine months ‘the deep purple places’ were going to be our home.

We started where it started, in Africa and in the Sub-Saharan band of countries that lie on the equator, where the first great wave of AIDS appeared and crashed over twenty years ago. Our first base was to be in a Kenyan community on a red road just like the one in the picture on the cover of the book I had just read before leaving and had with me in my rucksack.

That book, called The Ukimwe Road, was by the Irish travel writer, Dervla Murphy, a woman once described as ‘the toughest female traveller of her age’. The road Ms Murphy took had led her from Kenya to Zimbabwe, via Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia. She made the journey, by bicycle, in the early 1990s, intending to get away from personal difficulties and hoping to ‘enjoy a carefree ramble through some of the least hot areas in Sub-Saharan Africa’. But the further she pedalled the clearer it became that the purpose and subject matter of her journey and book were not going to be what she thought; everywhere she went she encountered talk of a mysterious threat of Ukimwe (a Swahili word for AIDS) and the devastating effect it was having on the people. By the time she reached journey’s end in Zimbabwe she had found her theme.

When I was eighteen, at a time when AIDS was seen as a disease restricted to affecting the gay community in San Francisco and had not even been given its final, contentiously agreed acronym,* I worked in Stanfords, a map and travel bookshop in Covent Garden. One day I was asked to assist a middle-aged lady who was looking for maps to Madagascar with a view to cycling around that massive African island in the Indian Ocean. The woman was the famous travel writer Dervla Murphy.

Twenty-four years later, my godfather – Jeff Barker – sent me the same book. He had just been to Ghana to work for VSO* reviewing the various AIDS NGOs (Non-governmental Organisations) there and he thought the book would be helpful. But when I received it and saw the cover depicting a painting of a red road bisecting yellow grass, spotted with acacia trees – the trees that say ‘Africa’ – I remembered that I had seen this book before and that I had, in fact, been given it by my wife, Nicola. I searched our bookshelves and found it. Inside, Nicola had written a date – ‘11th March, 2002’ (my 38th birthday) – and a suggestion: ‘For another possible (Brook-Sulman) adventure!’

At that time, we knew nothing about this coming journey. My wife had given me the book because she knew I’d once met the writer and also because it was time for us, as keen travellers, to go to the continent we had always been too busy, too afraid or too lazy to visit. Four years later, the prophesied adventure was under way and, like Murphy’s, it turned out to be a journey unlike the one we might have anticipated; a journey that would take us to Sub-Saharan Africa and way beyond. By the time we set our feet down on a real red dust road, HIV/AIDS was no longer a mysterious rumour whispered in villages or contained to a community in an American metropolis, it had become a full blown ululation of pain and grief that was echoing right around the planet.

On the night flight, we were abuzz with anticipation and medicine. Our anti-malarials were coursing through our blood and our biceps still ached from our final round of jabs. We were setting off on our journey, inoculated against a host of deadly diseases into the realms of a disease for which there was no cure. We had had four months of knowing for sure we were going and the idea of it had become almost too big to carry. We had read on and around the subjects of HIV/AIDS – and Africa. We had learned about prevalence rates and transmission; we had explained to Gabriel and Agnes – and reminded ourselves – how HIV passed from one person to another; we’d familiarised ourselves with the political arguments over interventionist approaches versus non-interventionist. And we had tried to get a sense of what life would be like in the communities we were going to. But reading medical texts, Chinua Achebe or Laurens van der Post only primed one part of us. Like soldiers trained for war through simulated combat, we were prepared for anything but we knew nothing.

When I was ten, I was given a beautifully illustrated copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. I still had the book and had read it to the children before we set off on this journey. It is, of course, an idealised, bucolic story and this was a different kind of adventure; but we were not unlike the Robinsons: green, middle-class, ‘civilised’, privileged, going into a world for which we were ill-equipped and unprepared, not knowing what we were going to find there – or what we were going to discover about ourselves.

We were met, in Nairobi, by April Foster, a member of the Salvation Army’s Regional Facilitation Team. April is an American who has worked in Africa for sixteen years and who, for the last twelve years, had lived in Kenya. Also there to greet and escort us to our new home was Mark Mutungwa, a young man who hailed from Kithituni, the rural town where April was building a house in which we were going to live. At the time of our arrival, this house was still being constructed. April had not yet lived in it herself, but she felt it was a good place for us to start: comfortable and safe enough for a green family to stay; raw and in the sticks enough to get close to the daily rhythms and disruptions of life in a rural African community and to see, close-up, the effects of the disease and the people’s response to it.

It was unusual – radical really – for someone who had never met us to offer us a house they themselves had not yet lived in, but it was a foretaste of the simple generosity of spirit we were going to encounter in that place. It was also – we were going to discover – a gesture in keeping with the nature of a woman who held ‘things’ lightly and had other ideas about how you spent your time and your money. April did not fit into any category I recognised. She was certainly no colonial looking to exploit the country’s resource for her own gain. For a white, single, foreign woman to build a house in a rural community with little infrastructure, poor water access and little power there had to be some other motivation.

April’s house – our new home – lay some 150 miles south-east of Nairobi. Once we got beyond the billboards for mobile phone companies and ‘Trust’ condoms and the outlying hotels and the first truck weigh station along the Mombasa Highway, the landscape opened out and the great Acacia plains of the Masai land spread out like a sea with a horizon as infinite as any ocean’s. Driving away from the capital we had the sensation of going out to sea, our vessel getting smaller and our voyage feeling bigger than we had supplies for.

In the 1980s, the British government had backed a big campaign informing the public of the dangers of having unprotected sex. AIDS was depicted as an iceberg, a largely hidden hazard, the full weight and ballast of which lay beneath the surface, ready to sink every happy ship that came its way. It was a frightening campaign and presumably effective in getting the sexually promiscuous British to wear condoms because the disease never reached the rates of infection and prevalence that the admen threatened. AIDS and icebergs make for an incongruous simile in equatorial Africa, but as we drove across the hot plain, I imagined the pandemic lying just out of view, below the surface, waiting to sink the next passing ship.

Mark drove steadily, mindful of the poor road surface and the high risk driving style of the matatus* and trucks that run the gauntlet of East Africa’s main trade route. The road – in a terrible state considering its significance to the nation – carried the freight, imports and exports of many countries; it was both artery and vein, conveying goods back and forth from heart to hinterland. The men who drove the trucks that carry the goods were not unlike sailors crossing a dangerous sea, away from home for long stints and susceptible to all the risks and temptations of loneliness and lust. All kinds of cargo is transported along this route, including the deadly freight of the HIV virus that through those drivers found an easy transit across the continent and into the outlying towns and villages.

Some say that the low life expectancy in African countries accounts for the careless driving. This is impossible to prove, but of all the possible ways we might die on this journey a car wreck was the most likely. We had only been in Kenya four days and had read of three major road crashes with a collective death toll of one hundred. I kept my eyes fixed on the potholes and measured the overtaking spaces between the oncoming trucks, whilst talking to Mark about the state of the nation.

President Kibaki has his hands full: a big scandal involving corrupt ministers driving expensive fleets of four-by-four vehicles, a drought which was killing people in the north of the country, and the ever-present battle against the unseen killer of HIV/AIDS. Mark spoke of these things in gentle, unaccusing tones but he was passionate about them. He was a strikingly beautiful man, inside and out. He had the high cheekbones of the Swahili-side tribes and an easy, languid grace and humility that you don’t encounter much in our own pumped-up, self-promoting culture. At first I thought I might be romanticising this, seeing things through the green eyes of the newly-arrived, but we soon discovered that these qualities were not uncommon. In fact, meeting people of grace and humility was to become such a regular feature of our journey that we came to expect it and were shocked when we didn’t find it.

We had heard from Ian Campbell that Mark was a key link in the chain of little connections that had led to the Salvation Army’s AIDS response in Kithituni. Without him April would not have decided to build a house there and we would quite likely not be making this journey.

I asked him to tell us how he’d got to this point in his life.

Seven years ago, HIV/AIDS was devastating his community and people were asking what could be done. The Salvation Army district officer at the time was a woman called Rebecca Nzuki. Rebecca had just come from the Kibera – the Nairobi slum – where she had been working among a group of women involved in commercial sex-work. She’d encouraged these women to meet and support each other financially and as they shared their experiences, a common thread emerged: most of them were HIV positive but had no means of support. Rebecca saw that they as a group of people would have to be their own support network. The women started to pool resources, visit each other, get medicines when they could. Without knowing it these women were modelling a communal method of response that was to provide a template for future HIV/AIDS response in Kithituni and beyond. In Kithituni, Rebecca transferred everything she had learned in the Kibera and began visiting the infected and the affected in their homes. This got people talking and then participating and she soon had ‘a team’ of local volunteers assisting her. Mark was one of the first to volunteer. He began to encourage others – his family, his friends and neighbours – to participate in the ‘home visits’ and ‘income-generating projects’ and ‘community counselling’ sessions. Getting his family involved was key. Mark was one of thirteen children. His mother and father – Agnes and Jonathan – were a totemic couple in this district. Jonathan was the head of the clan but also a quartermaster in the Salvation Army and the longest serving member of the Kithituni corps; he had been a Salvationist for fifty years. He was a man of influence – nearly all of it benevolent. It was Jonathan who had given April the plot of land on which to build her house – itself an unusual step, and the day Jonathan changed his mind about whether it was acceptable to openly discuss HIV/AIDS and sex in and around church was a key moment for the community in galvanising them to face up to and get to the root of what was killing them.

The response in Kithituni was infectious and it spread quickly through the region to a point where fifty communities had some level of community-led HIV/AIDS work. Hearing the good rumours emanating from this district, the regional team came to see the work and discovered that what was happening in this typical African community had something to teach a wider world.

Mark suddenly stopped talking and pointed to the sparse copses on the roadside: there, towering over the bushes like upside down trees, stood three giraffes. He pulled the vehicle off the side of the road and we all got out to get a closer look. We cheered at the sight of these animals – so other-worldly, so unlikely – that we had only ever seen in zoos. Mark said that it was unusual to see them so close to the road; the lack of rain was driving animals out of their usual habitat in search of water and vegetation but he had never seen them so far north.

‘Will we see a leopard here?’ Gabriel asked.

People come from all over the world to see the wildlife here and Kenya, with its long grass plains and acacia trees and wildlife, provides the archetypal mental landscape that forms many people’s idea of what Africa is. Looking at these beasts and seeing how our children reacted to the sight of them, I did feel a thrill of recognition; something in me was saying now you’re really here. But the feeling was checked by a kind of sadness. Our own safari – a Swahili word that means journey – was not going to involve much conventional sightseeing. We had not come to admire the beauty of the wildlife or even the landscape; we’d come to live in places tourists avoided, and to spend time with people who usually get overlooked by visitors too busy chasing the aesthetic to really notice, let alone connect with them; we had come to look for an animal more elusive, less pretty and far more deadly than any leopard.

At the road town of Sultan Hamud, Mark turned the vehicle left and onto an ‘A road’ of pure red dust. Our house was only six miles along this road but this stretch took half an hour to cover. For Mark terrible roads were a fact of life and he seemed impassive at the halting progress we made. We didn’t mind because it was part of the new; part of the adventure. Months later, putting a man called Pascal into a packed matatu in order to deliver him to the nearest hospital forty miles away, the state of these roads would seem less like a thing to love. For now though, they were the finest, most elemental roads – the red dust road of archetypal imagining.

We turned off this tributary onto a slightly narrower, even more dust-laden road. Little houses made from bricks and straw punctuated the view, while the people – mainly women and children – stood in front of their homes waving, selling, looking, smiling. More people were gathering at this intersection to collect water from the main waterhole. About twenty people with jerry cans and plastic tub barrels waited their turn to fill up with water that was there because an Italian company had built a pipeline from Mount Kilimanjaro some seventy miles to the south-east of us. When our bottled water from the Nairobi supermarket ran out this is where our own drinking water would come from.

This last stretch of road to our house was imprinted with deep truck tracks that were compacted enough for people to ride their bikes in. The rest of the road was deteriorating fast. Mark said this was caused by the trucks from Nairobi coming to take sand from the dried-up riverbed back to the city for concrete. Our house – April’s house – was just off this road, about a mile along it. The house was unlike all the other houses we had passed on the road here but it was not incongruous. Its character – its rondaval shape – was African even if its scale was Western. We were going to be living in relative luxury: the house had a generator that gave us power for three hours a day; we had a pit latrine that was more than fifty yards away from the accommodation; and we had running water. We were about forty minutes walk – twenty minutes bike ride – from the main town, the Salvation Army church, the market; and our nearest neighbours, just over the way, were Mark’s parents – Jonathan and Agnes – and his brother and sister-in-law Jacob and Margaret and their two sons Martin and Richard. We couldn’t have been in a better neighbourhood.

The house was still not finished and part of the welcoming contingent was made up from the building team who would be billeted on the land until their work was done. The Mutungwa family were also there to greet us: Jonathan a sprightly, impish seventy-year-old, still vigorous and nattily dressed in slack linen suit and trilby and Agnes, (handily having the same name as my daughter) quite regal and with a look of such strong, piercing love it made you want to confess your sins there and then, repent and change. Agnes had born thirteen children and her body shape showed this; but her face was quite sublime, all chiselled intelligence and a smile and teeth that dazzled. She spoke no English and our Kiswahili was fledgling but there was much understanding between us, communicated through hands clasped and cheeks kissed and a laugh that came from some deep place of knowing.

Words of greeting were exchanged and translated by Mark and Margaret. Then a tray of biscuits, sodas and water was brought out and put on the table. I helped pass drinks around (I was host and guest now) but when I handed Agnes a glass of water she took it, raised it and paused. I wasn’t sure why she was pausing and thought perhaps I had broken some arcane protocol, or that I should have offered her a soda or the bottled water that we had brought with us from Nairobi to drink instead of this water that came from the big plastic bin in our kitchen. But then I saw that her eyes were closed and that she was praying. She prayed for this glass of water for much longer than I have seen anyone pray a grace, even graces prayed before feasts and weddings. It was a holy toast to the God who had brought us here safely and who had made it possible for this water to fall from clouds into rivers and through pipes into wells to be poured into buckets and carried on bicycles to this place.

* The travel-writer, Bruce Chatwin, who died from an AIDS related illness in 1989 wrote: ‘the word AIDS is one of the cruellest and silliest neologisms of our time. Aid means succour, help, comfort yet with a hissing sibilant attached to the end it becomes a nightmare.’

* VSO or Voluntary Services Overseas is an international development charity that works through volunteers.