Personal Accounts from the frontlines of the AIDS Pandemic

 

"A few days into the new year of 2004, I was walking down a hospital corridor toward the room of a friend who was dying, when I had a flashback. Just for a moment, it felt like it was 1995 and I was in a hospital in upstate New York, approaching the room of another friend who was also dying. Of course it wasn't 1995. I wasn't in New York, and I wasn't visiting my gay white friend who was dying of AIDS. It was a new year in a new century. I was in Cape Town, South Africa, and this time the friend dying of AIDS was a black mother of three children."

 

Two friends: a wealthy, white, gay man

in America and a poor, black mother in

South Africa. The only thing they had in

common was that they died of AIDS.

Yet, when I think of Nombulelo, John

creeps into my memory. And when I think

of HIV/AIDS in South Africa today, I’m

transported back to the start of the

AIDS epidemic in the U.S. in the 1980s.