It’s been a week now since I’ve left Swaziland, and I have had some time to myself to reflect.  Quite honestly, I am still not sure if anything really means anything, if anything really is important.  I left my home and my relatively comfortable career two years ago to find Joel.  No, of course I know.  Joel is dead.  I get that.  But I came to Africa, planting myself in the middle of a raging AIDS pandemic, to try to understand that simple yet incredibly complex fact.  And after so many deaths and so much sickness these past two years, I am still no closer to the answer.  In 4 days, Joel will have been dead 3 years.  In 4 days, thousands more will die on the African continent because they had the poor taste to have been born into lives of poverty and suffering that don’t remain in anyone’s consciousness longer than Madonna’s next act (although the hell with the critics who would rather see a child deserted and raised in an orphanage, somehow equating that with a rich cultural heritage- the hell with you all. What are YOU doing?). 

I learned a lot more than I wanted to about the absence of ethic and moral will.  HIV has become a big business in Africa, supporting tens of thousands of organizations and salaries that serve no purpose beyond their own financial survival.  Millions of dollars have been spent supporting the hotel and restaurant business in the name of AIDS, as workshop after workshop is held to “discuss issues and strategies” over buffet lunches (as scores of overweight women attending the workshops are stuffing their purses with food while thousands in the rural areas can’t take their antiretrovirals for lack of a decent meal).  And as a young boy is dumped at my local hospital to die of AIDS-related opportunistic diseases, the headlines of the national paper read, “Swazis must beat their children.”

So, what have I learned?  I saw young 23 and 24 year olds leave their safe homes and families in places like Iowa and Minnesota to live in the middle of Africa, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of an AIDS pandemic, in the middle of hell.  I listened to them as they told stories of the children on their homesteads who were so sick that the only way they found comfort was to be carried on the backs of these young, idealistic volunteers when the child’s own family members had no time or interest or perhaps just not enough energy left to hold children at all.  I saw these young volunteers from America bring 7 year old girls to the clinic for treatment of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases as a result of rape by grandfathers, fathers, and uncles.  And I listened to the confusion and despair as they saw the rapists, abusers, tyrants excused by the family, victims robbed not only of legal recourse but of any recourse at all.  I saw these volunteers fight with nurses and doctors for the lives of young children that no one wanted to test or treat for HIV and that no one wanted to care for anymore.  I saw volunteers cry with despair after learning of the sexual relationships between adult teachers they called friends and the very young girls attending the volunteers’ anti-HIV and health clubs.  I saw the final volunteer who had yet to be touched by this disease here fight for his young sisi’s life at the hospital, trying to work things out with the doctor while still keeping from the family the fact that she was HIV positive.  And I remember his sms, shortly after midnight a week later, telling me he was “at her funeral now”.  No one was left untouched, no innocence was spared.

And beyond the HIV issue, I saw young children whipped with a cane as they each got off the bus, their only crime being that the bus was late, and I clearly recognized the delight in the eyes of the “discipliner” (who refers to his beating stick as his “motivator.”)  I saw incompetence and greed rewarded as organizations continued to flourish in the absence of accountability and at the expense of orphans and vulnerable children.  I saw patients die in hospital for want of routine care, as IV fluids run dry days earlier and medicines are out of stock in the pharmacy.  I saw children abandoned by their mothers.  Many children.  Abandoned by their mothers, their fathers unknown faces at the other end of abandoned seed. And in the face of all this horridness, I saw young Peace Corps volunteers do battle the best they could, some in a very quiet way, others more outspoken or with more sophistication, living on homesteads without even clean water, or any water at all, while their Australian, Swedish, and Canadian counterparts lived in relative comfort in the major cities as they partnered with the NGOs who continue to get fat.

I saw lives saved, literally one by one, by young people who believed they could make a difference.  And they did make a difference even though many more lives were lost along the way.  They made a difference to people who were dying, when no one else either cared or noticed. The US may have made many mistakes in its foreign polity, but this is not one of them. I learned how important it is to be “seen” at the end of your life, however short or long it is, how important it is that someone knows you lived and breathed and shared the air with the rest of us.  The lives that Peace Corps volunteers couldn’t save they at least acknowledged. 

I’m still no closer to finding Joel, no closer to understanding any of this.  So my journey continues.  It doesn’t matter much what contribution I make or don’t make, not to me anyway.  I just move on, do what comes next.