A Groundbreaking

     Today we broke the ground for the new Community Center and site of CIDRZ campus in Lusaka. The building will be built over the next several years, with principle funding from USAID, the Mary Fisher Foundation, and several other partners. The ceremonies opened with a dance and theater group from Eastern province, who stamped and swayed and sang songs of the loss of their friends and relatives to HIV/AIDS. The epidemic swept through Zambia like wildfire, with almost every person knowing someone or losing someone close to them. Now, the time has come to transition from the state of emergency and control of the virus, to learning to live with the virus in the aftermath. The flow of anti-retrovirals to Zambia has ensured that through treatment, people can live full lives. The new Community Center will play a role in helping women learn vocational trades, and will bring together education, research, and treatment.
     After the theater group, we heard from several key government and agency representatives from Zambia and the US, exemplifying the partnerships that CIDRZ has worked to create, as well as the willingness of diverse groups to come together for HIV.
     Mary Fisher's speech was impassioned, moving, and full of grace. She told her story of being HIV positive herself, and her journey from the isolation of carrying the virus, to the redemption she found in realizing that there was a global community who would welcome her regardless of serostatus, race, or nationality. She spoke of the ties that bind individuals infected with HIV, and of the necessity of overcoming stigma, ignorance, and the pain of feeling as if you are alone in the world. It was a fantastic speech.
     I thought of the patient I had seen in a rural clinic the day before, who was in her mid-twenties and had four children under the age of 8 (two in infancy, twins). She had been diagnosed with HIV during her pregnancy. Her husband had left her while she was in her last trimester, and she had no way to earn a living other than selling food items on occasion. Her older children carried the twins on their backs, and she alternated them to nurse throughout the clinic visit. She had not yet started her anti-retrovirals and was breastfeeding, meaning her twins had a 40% chance of being HIV+ themselves. This patient, and her children who stared at me and giggled shy smiles behind their mother, give faces to the meaning of the battle of HIV.