Kenyans Seek Help in AIDS Fight

Last week, Mary Makokha and Dawo Kawa were in New Orleans to gain support for the battle against the spread of HIV/AIDS in Kenya with the help of American nonprofit groups. Makokha and Kawa were guests of the National Minority AIDS Council, which held workshops for about 200 HIV/AIDS activists. The council is one of several nonprofits sending assistance to Africa and sharing their knowledge with African nations. Organizers hope the collaboration will deliver a desperately needed transfusion of money and materials, including condoms, to the under-financed African groups. Only last year, Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi declared the epidemic a national disaster. Yet in most cases little, if any, government support has followed, the activists say.

Makokha and Kawa were amazed by the wealth of information and materials in New Orleans -- particularly on Bourbon Street. In Kenya, the boxes of condoms delivered are sometimes up to 5 years old. About 32 percent of people in Makokha's district (Busia), Kenya's hardest hit, test positive for HIV. About twice a week, Makokha rides a public bus with dozens of plastic tubes jostling in a carry-all bag. Her destination: a hospital 30 kilometers away in western Kenya. "Each week I take the blood to be tested," Makokha said. "Sometimes before I get there, it spoils because we have no refrigeration. They have to be tested again." Makokha and Angela Shiloh-Cryer, executive director of Great Expectations of New Orleans, which participated in the conference, said there is a common concern on both continents for poor women who often feel helpless to turn down sexual overtures and offers of financial assistance from partners. While at the conference, she showed a photograph of an expressionless 18-year-old woman before a freshly dug grave of her husband who died of AIDS. "So many orphans, so many funerals. So much death," Makokha said.

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