06/10
2008
2008
I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
This blog is named after a found object — a plastic lion that was in a crate of discarded items a friend and a few other artists had gathered. I sat on their roof in Nakasero, Kampala sorting through the crate. On that day, I was looking for something. “You are lost!” a Uganda might say. But, I’d found this discarded kid’s toy, made in China on the cheap, that somehow ended up in East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint-chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this place: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
... on Why Invisible Children can’t explain away this photo
This camera isn’t on, but the kid sure is cute! Frank in on the Uganda-Kenya border reporting on Kenyan refugees after election turmoil.
Frank Nyakairu has received one of the two Knight International Journalism awards for 2008.
Frank on a UN chopper in Sudan, on our way to Nabanga for the most recent attempt at peace talks.
I’m attending the HIV Implementers Conference this week. It’s a whole bunch of PEPFAR officials in town for a few days.
A few facts about the conference, compared to facts about ARVs:
1,500 people attending the conference
$22 for lunch
$33,000 for lunch. In Kampala, you can get a nice local lunch for about Ush 3,000 ($1.50). The conference goes from Wednesday to Saturday, so that’s 4 lunch sessions, for a total of $132,000.
$15 Generic ARVs for one month
Therefore, if all these delegates forgo their pricey lunch, 8,800 people could be on ARVs for a month, or 733 people for a year.
Insecurity affecting HIV funding in Karamoja
KOTIDO, 3 June 2008 (PlusNews) – Frances Otim, living in Kotido, an urban centre in Uganda’s northeastern Karamoja region, doesn’t use condoms because he doesn’t know how, and doesn’t use a mosquito net because the one he has is ripped.
For most adults, malaria isn’t life threatening, but for people living with HIV, acute malaria causes a spike in viral load – the amount of the virus present in the body. This in turn heightens a sexual partner’s risk of contracting the virus. “I had malaria last week,” Otim, who is HIV-positive, told IRIN/PlusNews at the Church of Uganda Health Centre in Kotido.
“We need to teach about condoms,” said Patience Ajok, the centre’s programme coordinator. She would like to do this, as well as a lot of other activities related to HIV prevention and treatment, but is limited by a tiny budget and having very few staff members. “The number of [HIV-positive] clients is increasing, but personnel and funding is not.”
Insecurity affecting HIV funding in Karamoja
KOTIDO, 3 June 2008 (PlusNews) – Frances Otim, living in Kotido, an urban centre in Uganda’s northeastern Karamoja region, doesn’t use condoms because he doesn’t know how, and doesn’t use a mosquito net because the one he has is ripped.
For most adults, malaria isn’t life threatening, but for people living with HIV, acute malaria causes a spike in viral load – the amount of the virus present in the body. This in turn heightens a sexual partner’s risk of contracting the virus. “I had malaria last week,” Otim, who is HIV-positive, told IRIN/PlusNews at the Church of Uganda Health Centre in Kotido.
“We need to teach about condoms,” said Patience Ajok, the centre’s programme coordinator. She would like to do this, as well as a lot of other activities related to HIV prevention and treatment, but is limited by a tiny budget and having very few staff members. “The number of [HIV-positive] clients is increasing, but personnel and funding is not.”
Copyright Glenna Gordon/AP
Before I went to Karamoja and said, “This is the worst, saddest, poorest place I have ever been,” the quarry in Kireka took that title, which I visited earlier this month. The little boy profiled in this story had lost everything, had nothing, and no options. I went to the neighborhood to take photos for a story another journalist had already reported. I’d visited Kireka before, but I hadn’t met Stephen.
Copyright Glenna Gordon/AP
One drunken evening, or rather, sometime in the wee hours of the morning, several journalists, myself included, discussed Stephen’s fate. Should we pay his school fees? Put him in an orphanage? He has HIV/AIDS, and he’s not eating enough to absorb medicine in Kireka, nor is the man acting as his guardian, his uncle, likely to do much for Stephen. His uncle has AIDS, too. The conversation turned to the horrors of orphanages, but ultimately, we didn’t know what else to do. Paying some money now for school fees or medicine is temporary, unsustainable, and will just mean Stephen is left without anything should my pack of journos up and leave for another country, another story.
This the kind of conversation had too frequently by expats in Africa, so aware of our own futility.
We still haven’t sorted it out, and for now, our indecision is Stephen’s continued poor health.
Now, several photos are on the web, a nice photo slide show, and as usual, more are here.
All photos Copyright Glenna Gordon/AP
All photos Copyright Glenna Gordon/AP