Women singing and clapping

Singing/drumming

Wilson:  In the backstreets of Lusaka, a ceremony born more of desperation than superstition.

00.15

One of the locals has fallen ill, but this is a neighbourhood which simply never sees conventional, well-trained doctors, let alone one with a bag of modern medicine.

00.28

Moses and Thomas

Moses Kaleya is the cinanga [phonetic] in this slum corner of the Zambian capital. He's a witchdoctor. 

00.54

His patient Thomas, 33 is married and -- unusually in this explosively populated corner of southern Africa - is  without children.

He is also without a chance of survival. Thomas is a dying citizen of a doomed community at one end of a deadly hot-zone -- the most  AIDS afflicted place on earth. It's not hard to understand why these destitute souls turn to faith and magic.

1.10

Van Praag

Super:

ERIC VAN PRAAG

World Health Organisation

Van Praag:  I think we are now at a stage in Africa, in particular in southern Africa where we think the epidemic is out of hand.

1.34

Women wailing at funeral

FX:  Women wailing

Wilson:   This is the fate that awaits them. A few suburbs away at Lusaka's mortuary, a daily procession of death.

All day - every day - men, women, the old and the young - even babies - struck down by AIDS.

As soon as one body is taken away to be buried another is brought in.

1.49

This is the end of  the road  in a 2,000 kilometre tour of tragedy across three African nations.

2.22

Highway

FX:  Music

2.37

Wilson:   A journey along a highway which carries the killer virus to ten of millions.  It is without question the biggest medical disaster the world faces.  Or is the world simply turning its head.

2.40

Map Africa

Music

3.07

Highway

Wilson:  Africa's highways are the lifelines of a continent.

The distances are vast.

And for long-haul drivers like 26 year-old Abednigo Chinoyi, the days are long and lonely.

3.29

Abednigo in truck

Abednigo :  Women, mostly they like truck drivers,

Wilson:  Why's that?

Abednigo:   I don't know, they think we've got too much money, I don't know.

3.46

Wilson:  Shanty settlements, villages and roadside markets line his milk run along Botswana's Highway Number One,  and at each and every stop, AIDS has taken hold.

3.57

Wilson:  What's wrong with  the women?

Abednigo:  These days they have too much diseases like AIDS. Most of the truck drivers are dying from AIDS.

Wilson:  Do you know many truck drivers that have died of AIDS?

Abednigo:  Many of them.

Wilson:  Really?

Abednigo:   Yes.

Abednigo couldn't hope to know the precise toll but then neither do governments or agencies - the scale of the problem is beyond their capacity to measure let alone treat.

4.10

Highway

Wilson:   So where do the truck drivers go to drink?

Abednigo:  By the bar. After that building.

Wilson:  What is known though is that this town - Francistown in Botswana - is the capital of the AIDS pandemic.

4.49

Interior of bar

Bar music

4.57

Wilson:  In the bars - and there are many - it's easy to see why. Prostitution is rife. It's cheap and easy  and no-one seems to bother with protection.

Abednigo:   I think most of the people they don't understand that AIDS is there. They don't understand.

They think that AIDS may be something like a lie... there's nothing like that.

5.02

5.16

Abednigo in bar

Ask many people, some of them they tell you there's no AIDS. There's nothing like that.

Wilson:  Well what do they think it is?

Abednigo:  Like I told you, like witchcraft or some sort.

Prostitutes in bar

Wilson:  It's just a matter of minutes before the soliciting begins. Esther is well known at this bar, one of the highway's five dollar prostitutes. She sells unprotected sex and if she isn't already HIV positive it's only a matter of time.

5.46

Abednigo

Abednigo: She was telling me she wants to go to Zimbabwe. Now I know she doesn't want to go Zimbabwe -- she wants to sleep with me. She likes truck drivers too much.

6.06

Wilson:  Abednigo is married. He has a young child and says he doesn't stray too much.

Abednigo:  Then if I sleep with her without a condom

6.20

I will drive as far as Malape -- I will get another one. I will spread my AIDS -- maybe she's got AIDS... I don't know. I go Malape ... I spread it again - Gabs - I spread it. I come  to my house, I spread it to my wife. In a month I think you can spread AIDS to more than thirty people.

6.26

Guys enter bar

Bar music

Wilson:  But the truck drivers and travellers at the Triple S Bar aren't all as diligent as Abednigo. On a busy night, each of the dozen or so prostitutes here may have sex three or four men. This scene is repeated the length of the highway. It's difficult to conceive of a more effective way of propagating this killer disease.

6.58

Van Praag:  Of the estimated 30 million people living with HIV in the world, 22 of those million of those are living  in Africa. You can see what an

7.21

Van Praag

impact that will have on the whole society, on the economic development, on schooling, on everything.

Sun/Women at funeral

Funeral song

7.38

Wilson:  Sunday morning. And as the last stragglers leave the bars, on the other side of Francistown there's a more sombre homecoming. Kabiso Ben was unmarried, 30 and supporting a child. To survive she turned to prostitution. It killed her, although no one will confirm the cause - AIDS is a shameful end.

Priest: We don't know what has happened here.

7.47

 Priest

We don't know. People are always ill, there is diseases they call it AIDS. Sure sometimes we hear the people say it, this thing is caused by this. This is AIDS.

8.16

Mourners

Wilson:  This is a town of 50 thousand and yet it's burying its citizens like a big city.  Twenty  funerals a day at this graveyard alone. In Francistown, one in 4 adults are HIV positive  -- one in every two pregnant women.

8.43

Reverend White [?] looks on helplessly knowing poverty, ignorance, carelessness and a fatal disregard for fact, combine to kill his people like nothing else.

Priest:  They don't want condoms --they dislike them. They say these things are not good for them.

9.01

Priest

Some of them said when they use them they find that their kidneys are bad and some said when they used them their stomachs expanded.

Van Praag:  I think one of the reasons why the response has been so difficult

9.14

9.41

Van Praag

Super:

ERIC VAN PRAAG

World Health Organisation

and slow is that HIV/AIDS is a disease which affects people so much emotionally, leads to so much denial as it is a combination of sex and death, and there are very few examples of disease in history where sex and death are so closely linked.

Sunset/Driving shots

Music

10.18

Wilson:  Travelling with the flight of AIDS north to Zimbabwe, we find that the death toll is so impacting the adult population, its brought a crisis in the workforce and changed the way bosses employ staff.

10.19

Tawanda and Wilson in factory

Tawanda:  It is affecting the workforce, the people who are productive, the 20 to 30 age group.

10.39

Wilson:  Tawanda Marongwe is factory manager at the Vitafoam plant in Bulawayo. He's watching skilled workers die around him.

10.45

Tawanda:  The people who are going to the clinics and having to go back again, repeatedly being diagnosed with all of the AIDS related diseases. That is killing our work time and productivity.

Harding:  The trouble with AIDS is that it is in itself a

10.54

Harding

Super:

PETER HARDING

Human Resources Mgr. Vitafoam

fiscal war that we're waging, and whilst we may be used to military encounters in Africa, we're not used to this type of warfare.

11.07

Wilson:  Now when they hire here it's with a practical fatalism -- the cold certainty of  epidemic death. Peter Harding will draft as many as 20 to ultimately do the job of just one.

11.24

Harding:  If a worker at any skilled level was working for you in 1990, at the present moment you would probably need six to take his place, because obviously there'd be other attrition amongst that six - but it can go up to as many as 20 to one.

11.40

Sibonkosi cooking

Wilson:  Across town in Bulawayo's slums 14 year old Sibonkosi Mhlanga is doing the job of two adults -- her mother and father.

11.55

Sibonkosi:  My mother was sick for a long time. She was very, very sick. She was not eating, drinking or even walking.  They took her to the hospital and she passed away while we were at Solus so we came here for the burial service, but I did not see her.

Wilson:   Why didn't you see her?

Sibonkosi:   I was afraid.

12.00

Children say grace

Wilson:  Sibonkosi is one of  a new generation of African children that will emerge in the years ahead, millions who will never know a childhood under the care of parents.

12.55

Sibonkosi

Sibonkosi: I wake up so early and sweep the yard and sometimes I clean the house and the toilet -- then go to school. After school, I just sit down to prepare food.

Wilson:   And then it's bedtime again.

Sibonkosi:  Yes.

Wilson:   Doesn't leave much time for playing.

Sibonkosi:  No. 

13.02

Bedroom

Wilson:  She's smart and studious. She's already a head girl at school and hopes one day to be a teacher. But her chances of success are slim - her future is mortgaged to her family -- two brothers, a sister and an ailing grandmother.

Sibonkosi sitting reading bible on step

Wilson:  This is your favourite verse.

Sibonkosi:  Yes.

Wilson:  What does it say?

Sibonkosi:  Mark 10, Verse 14...But when Jesus saw it He was greatly displeased and said to them -- Let the little children come to me and do not forbid them for such is the kingdom of God.

Wilson:  What does that mean?'

Sibonkosi:  It means that God loves the little children, so all the adults who do not like their children to go to church have got sins-so, little children are loved by God.

13.56

Sibonkosi's brothers

Wilson:  But she'll soon have cause to question that -- one of Sibonkosi's siblings has the symptoms of AIDS.

14.36

Singing/clapping

14.50

Bridge over Zambezi

Wilson:  The mighty Zambezi river marks the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. But nature's boundaries are no barrier to the passage of HIV through Africa, nor is age.

14.56

Professor Bhat attending to children in hospital

Professor:  He's still sick.

15.16

Wilson:   In Zambia AIDS has ravaged life expectancy by twenty-five percent to just 47.

But if you're new to the world here in Lusaka's main children's ward, life is measured in days and weeks.

Professor:  We have looked at the antibody prevalence among the women

15.18

Professor

Super:

Professor BHAT

Paediatrician

who are delivering at the University Teaching Hospital. About 30 percent, three times more in the last ten years, ‘89 to ‘99.

15.39

Woman with baby

Wilson:  Many of these babies have been born with HIV. One in five will not leave here alive. Despite the daunting and often futile job of caring for these tiny lives, the head of paediatrics here sees a glimmer of hope. Professor Bhat is something of an optimist.

Professor:  We are at the peak of this epidemic because for the last two or three years the HIV prevalence

15.55

16.16

Professor

among the pregnant women who are less than 20 years -- these are the teenage mothers, it's going down.  So that is an indication that this are the young girls and the boys, I think they are aware of the problems and they're careful.

Women sitting in compound with Deborah

Deborah:  Can you tell me some of your story?

Woman:  I am a widow. I lose my husband this year on the 10^th of January.

16.44

Wilson:  In the thick of all this despair, a young Australian volunteer.

Deborah Boswell counsels the AIDS widows of Zambia. Many of these women contracted HIV from their husbands and face a slow death in the slums of Lusaka.

Deborah:  Fatalism is rife, so if people are not going to die of aids they're going to die of malaria, they're going to die of meningitis. life expectancy in Zambia

16.59

Deborah

is 43. So people expect to die. So it's not actually a threat to be talking to people, giving messages about the fact that aids kills or using fear tactics when there actually is no fear.

17.10

Wilson:  In a country where AIDS education is patchy at best, Deborah is assembling personal accounts as a warning to others.

17.35

Deborah:  In Zambia they argue that there is about 95 percent awareness, the levels are at about 95 percent,  but what you're seeing is that actually doesn't translate into behaviour change. There's a lot of reasons for that;  a lot to do with gender, some to do with tradition, and some to do with cultural practices.

17.42

Dancing at conference session

Drumming

18.01

Wilson:  And a lot to do with resources and priorities.

18.04

Welcome to the Eleventh International Conference on Sexually Transmitted Diseases and AIDS in Africa. A lofty title for a gathering of authorities and experts looking for ways to sandbag the AIDS tidal wave and eventually turn it round.

Mebevo:  What makes this even more tragic

18.09

Mebevo

Super:

CALLISTA MEBEVO

Africa Rep. World Bank

is the fact that it is avoidable. we know what works in preventing  HIV, and in caring for persons with AIDS, but nowhere is the effort strong enough to turn the epidemic back.

18.26

Wilson:  They've come to Lusaka from all over the world, but perhaps most telling of all is who didn't show up. For all the theories advanced here don't amount to much at all without some political imperative. And not a single African president is among the delegation.

Van Praag:  We have all been trying to

18.46

Van Praag

open up but facing so much political, psychological constraints that we have been late and we have been limited in our response.

19.05

Thomas with witch doctor

19.24

Wilson:  And so without  the prospect of practical medicine  Zambians take solace in their ancient beliefs.

If, as Thomas reckons, his illness is the result of a neighbour's curse, then the solution's simple. When witchcraft's the cause, then witchcraft can also be the cure.

19.27

Drumming

19.51

Wilson:  But Thomas will soon succumb to his illness. Few Africans live longer than five years beyond initial infection.

19.56

He'll be another statistic in  a continent overwhelmed by AIDS.  And the tragedy is -  the worst is yet to come.

20.05

Drumming