A national disgrace

Lying in front of the tv last night - like I usually do looking exactly like Jack's insomnia scene from Fight Club - I happened to stumble on an Earth Report on BBC World called Children of Rio.

The report focuses on the 10 years between the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the World Summit in Joburg last year. Film-maker Bruno Sorrentino's idea was passionately straightforward: follow the lives of seven children born during the Rio Summit - if it was to mean anything at all to ordinary people, surely it would have affected the lives of these babies and their families? Ten years later after Rio, the crew revisits the children to find out just what has changed, and what the future holds for them.

Among other startling facts, they claimed that one in nine South African's are living with HIV/Aids. And when one of the local participants was asked what he'd change if he had the power, his reply was that that he'd stop adults from raping children. Not easy to digest, and keeps you thinking for hours afterwards.

Tonight, I read this article, about a gang of eight men, all HIV+, in KZN who repeatedly raped a woman under the belief that sex with a virgin would cure their disease. I'd never heard of this before, but it's apparently quite a popular myth, and a national disgrace.

It is a fact that 70 000 children living in KZN have been orphaned by Aids. It is a fact that one in three people living in rural KZN is infected with HIV - more than triple the national infection rate of 11 percent. This is reality. If it's this much in our faces now, imagine the situation in just 4 years time.

I can't do anything meaningful with these figures, they do however make me wish I could. And as that Wallflowers song goes:

Sometimes it's hard to tell the wishing from the well, Where you threw the penny and where it fell.