Silence

AIDS, the silent killer of Africa is not so silent after all. The fact that we don’t want to hear it does not mean that millions of people are not screaming for help and support. They are. Loud and clear, they are begging for your attention, for your educated word to say enough to the injustices committed against them on a daily basis. All they are asking for is for you to say enough as group. To allow free medical treatment to reach them, to ignore the benefits of killing Africa, and not to believe the humanitarian commercials or think the 20 € a month will ever make any difference.
The newspapers and media have forgotten them and we think that if we don’t see it, it’s no longer there. This attitude is not only cruel but also murderous and insulting to the people infected by AIDS.
International Aid in Mozambique gives billions to education and to agriculture knowingly they are throwing their money away, or rather distracting the social attention making believe that these are the issues to be solved. This attitude refrains us from understanding that soon there will be no one to educate and the people enjoying the benefits of agriculture will be people with names like Chong or Chingdau, which in my opinion is the plan all along.
I do have the figures here, numbers of infected people, number of dead per year, and numbers of families destroyed by AIDS, but I will not bore you with details. Deep inside you know these numbers; you feel them as a human being. You can hear the cry of the child abandoned in the streets of Maputo because both his parents have died of AIDS, you can hear the elder African finding himself with 4 small children to breed because his son has died of AIDS. You can, if you pay attention, clearly hear every last breath of life from the one million a month who lose their life from AIDS or the cries of hunger from the three million abandoned kids.
Being here and being confronted with seeing friends who suffer AIDS is terrible. The physical deterioration the body endures is dramatic, there is no way of hiding it. And here is an element added to the tragedy; People here still consider AIDS a kind of witchcraft. Being diagnosed with the virus will publicly isolate you. Thus people hide it from their peers or avoid thinking of it until its too late. The problem is that their act of hiding includes acting normally in their sexual lives, making these millions of individuals potential hidden killers.
And then we have this Nazi Pope come to Africa in his White bulletproof car (No faith in god, I believe) and his white robe and all his entourage claiming that condoms are the cause of AIDS. Get the hell out of here man!!