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In AIDS battle, Tanzanian villages ban risky traditions
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Asha Saidi's tryst was supposed to go like this: At dusk, she would meet the man at an abandoned hut on the edge of he village. He'd bring four cans of Safari Lager. They'd have sex. Then he'd give her 10,000 Tanzanian shillings — roughly $13 — to help feed her five children.
Instead, she says, the pair was just polishing off the beer when club-wielding militiamen swept in and arrested them for violating a new rule banning nocturnal visits to abandoned huts.
“If I do it again, the whole village will think I'm mentally retarded," Ms. Saidi says.
Here on the shores of Lake Victoria, hundreds of communities have discovered a potential key to curbing the African AIDS epidemic: Laws can sometimes make progress where doctors and health workers alone have failed. In the past few years, local governments and village councils have cracked down on a wide variety of traditional social and sexual practices that had made this area quite literally a breeding ground for HIV.
Mwalinha, population 2,650, a dusty scattering of mud-brick huts and cassava fields, has outlawed dancing after dark, and women can't be served alcohol after 6 p.m. The village of Itumbili, several kilometers down rutted roads, recently banned a particularly hazardous harvest rite called chagulaga, meaning “choose", which involves men chasing unmarried women into the bush and coupling for the night. Another village, Nyakaboja, even make it a crime to flirt, punishable with the payment of a chicken.
For the most part, the new laws arose from an innovative research project funded by the Dutch government. Originally, the project's goal was simply to draw up maps of 900 villages and neighborhoods in Magu district, which covers 4,810 square kilometers, pinpointing dance clubs, abandoned huts and other likely hotspots for HIV transmission. Gradually, however, village leaders began using the maps to create legislation aimed at nothing less than a grass-roots transformation of their culture.
Now, Magu has become something of a Mecca for health professional scrambling to stop the spread of a disease that has already claimed 17 million lives south of the Sahara — nearly 80% of the global AIDS death toll.
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