Putting a face on AIDS: Fulbright scholar humanizes African AIDS through essays
Alumni & Friends, Summer/Fall 2004
In Burkina Faso, a West African country the size of Colorado, the AIDS crisis has reached overwhelming proportions; where about 7 percent of the 13 million citizens have AIDS.
Fulbright scholar Lauren Smith hopes to humanize those statistics through her forthcoming book of portrait essays called “A West African AIDS Quilt: Stories from Burkina Faso.”
Smith, an assistant professor of women’s studies, recently returned from her second research trip to Burkina Faso, sponsored by an $18,000 Fulbright grant. Smith is one of approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who traveled abroad for the 2003-2004 academic year through the Fulbright Scholar Program.
“The portrait essays are creative nonfiction essays that are meant to humanize the statistics about AIDS,” Smith said. “There is a lot of scholarly writing and journalism on AIDS in West Africa, but it focuses on the statistics, on the medical details. We don’t have a clear vision of how individual people are affected by the AIDS epidemic.”
Following leads from activists, public health workers and members of civic groups who are on the “front line” in the fight against AIDS in Burkina Faso, Smith traveled to large cities and remote villages to interview.
“I went into areas that were very poor and it’s already a poor country,” Smith said. “The roads were very bad and sometimes there were no roads and we were sort of twisting around on these pock-marked paths.”
These same paths gave rise to a vehicle breakdown that stranded them on their way back from Dedougou to the capital city of Ouagadougou. Smith was staying there with her husband, Hassimi Traore, a native of Burkina Faso and UW-Whitewater associate professor of chemistry, their daughter Myriama and a few of their relatives. They walked three miles in the rain to a remote village to find help in repairing the vehicle. The village had no electricity or signal for phone, and the group slept on straw chairs, unsure how they would return to Ouagadougou.
“While in the village, we looked around and saw no electricity, no telephone lines. In a situation like that you think you have no resources at your disposal, but you are looking with a Westerner’s eye,” Smith said. “There are resources, but it’s as if they are hidden somewhere, and you’re unable to see them. Burkinabe people would say, ‘don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.’”
A series of strangers assisted Smith, sending mechanics to the car and relatives to the bus station to pick her up that evening. Smith said that instead of having to prove you are a decent person in Burkina Faso in order to receive aid, Burkinabe people believe it is their duty to be kind and always help in whatever way they can.
“The kind of help that is waiting around the corner in Burkina Faso would almost always be in the form of other people instead of something you can pay for or find in a phone book,” Smith said. “ I don’t want to over-romanticize this, but it is a place where people help each other and where generosity of spirit is expected and appreciated, encouraged and valued—partly because this is all that people have, and partly because of the culture itself.”
It was this same generosity that Smith encountered in Angelique, a retired 60- year-old teacher living in Ouagadougou. Angelique, who has lost two of her eight children to AIDS, with a third now infected, helps everyone she can in memory of the children she has lost.
“Her reaction has been to throw herself into helping other AIDS victims and other young people with difficulties,” Smith said. “There is a parade of people who come to her house. She takes each one and tries to figure how she can help and who else might have something to offer.”
Smith also met Irene, a widow who had lost her daughter and son-in-law to AIDS and is now caring for their four children. Irene grows what food she can on a small plot of land, which Smith estimated at about three times the size of her office. She suffers from elephantiasis of the legs, and her eldest grandson, who is at an age where he could help her, suffers from rheumatoid arthritis.
“They didn’t know from day to day what they were going to eat,” Smith said. “And she would have liked to give up the ghost, but felt she had to stick around and help her grandchildren.”
“Burkinabe people are actively working to improve the conditions they live under,” Smith emphasized. “They are not passive victims at all, but are really struggling hard.” – Kate Stoffel