ARTicles vol. 6 i.3b: Foreign Aids

While performing Foreign Aids at the A.R.T. in January of 2005, I also visited schools in Boston with a message of hope: “Look fear in the face and win!” It was an enriching experience of diversity and feedback from the youth. But my experience visiting schools in the United Kingdom had been different.

“When a white person gets AIDS, do they go black?” I thought she was joking. No one laughed. This young black girl was quite serious. And she wasn’t at a school somewhere in the backwaters of South Africa. This was Wembley in North London! It was during my 2003 season of Foreign Aids at the Tricycle Theatre. I visited a few local schools with my AIDS-awareness presentation, For Facts Sake. This assault on the stigmas and denials around HIV and AIDS was strengthened by the weapon of mass distraction — humour. When people laugh, they lower their defences. When they laugh at something they don’t even want to think about, new areas of understanding are possible. And ultimately, to laugh at fear can only make that fear less fearful. It can still kill you, but now at least you feel in charge. How can you be frightened of something you’ve laughed at? Not because it’s funny, but because you now know it is so much smaller than you once thought.

I’ve toured For Facts Sake to South African schools for the past six years and have so confronted over one million school kids with the raw facts of life. Happily, there is much laughter. Sex can be very funny. Unless of course you’re trying very hard to do it successfully. Kids know so much nowadays, especially with the info-orgy on cell phones, the internet, and television. But often they’ve not had first-hand experience. And that’s the agenda — don’t deny the threat of the virus, but inform them what it is and how to live with it.

In Wembley, within a few minutes of the presentation, the discomfort was tangible. Teachers squirmed. The young people looked embarrassed. And when someone had the courage to ask a question, what answer could I give? “No, whites don’t turn black when they have AIDS. AIDS is democratic. It doesn’t take sides. Everyone is susceptible.”

The first world and its passionate sexy generation of warriors have relaxed the 1980s vigilance of HIV and AIDS. The days are over when every movie star wore a red ribbon. Now they’re lost under the multicoloured explosion of different ribbons and armbands representing every cause imaginable. Besides, today there are medications, treatments and cocktails for survival.

No one needs to die of AIDS in 2007. And yet we in South Africa are still losing 1000 people every day. Every three days we have a 9/11 situation and hardly anyone says anything. We are still waiting for President Mbeki to acknowledge publicly that HIV leads to AIDS. So we are still on Square One. Occasionally international questions are asked and answered with a smooth-tongued, Tony Blairish burst of gesture-politics. “We will roll out ARVs by 2011,” the Minister of Health burbled recently. Cheers to her, this now notorious alcoholic kleptomaniac nut, who single-handedly has buried a generation of her people through lack of care. She’s still way off the mark. 2011? No, we need roll-outs by twenty past 11:00 tonight! The urgency is critical.

So is the need for education and the focus on survival. School children are not the problem. Their parents are. I suppose this is a universal hangover from the days of “sies” and “hush” and silence. We mature kids had to find our own way through the minefield of sex, confronting disease and morality with fear and fantasy. But today’s teenager needs to know the full alphabet of facts to be in control of their life ahead.

The challenge is to avoid the dreaded dreariness of a lecture, filled with dry facts, confusing percentages and figures that bore. Education through entertainment is one way. When school children are taken out of the classroom routine and confronted with a comedy turn about a serious issue, they will remember most of the laughs. Those facts might save their lives. Speaking the language they understand is also a bridge between my generation and theirs. You use that f-word not to celebrate freedom of speech but to focus on where the minefield is. The kids are riveted. The teachers go white, especially the black ones. And I’ve seen one or two nuns smile.

International AIDS Day is December 1st. Why only one day in the year to dust off the red ribbon and pat the condom in the pocket? Every day should be AIDS Day, because every day brings the opportunities to invite the virus into one’s life. Sex and drugs and rock and roll? If only it was that simple. It’s through semen and blood, stupid! While modern medical miracles allow lives to be extended and lived to the full, God help us in Wembley, Washington, Boston, Beijing and Cape Town if the HI-virus reinvents itself and re-enters our lives, immune to all our efforts to neutralize it. The only salvation is knowledge. During apartheid the South African Government killed people. Now in our democracy it just lets them die. Time to change all that. Let the people lead and maybe the government will follow.

Pieter-Dirk Uys performed Foreign Aids at the A.R.T. in January of 2005.

Articles issue as 6_3