Bury your nose: Fairview grad writes of her experience with AIDS in Africa
December 9, 2009 by admin
Filed under A & E, Book of the month
“No Place Left to Bury the Dead,” by Nicole Itano. Atria Books, 338 pp. $25.
The AIDS epidemic — it’s so ’80s, isn’t it? There are drug “cocktails” that keep HIV-positive Americans safe, healthy and living fairly normal lives. You hardly ever read about it in the media anymore. It’s just not a big deal, now.
Or maybe not. In the United States, HIV infections among some demographic groups are on the rise.
Meanwhile, AIDS continues to utterly ravage Africa.
Fairview High School graduate Nicole Itano, who spent five years living in South Africa, wants America to know that the epidemic is anything but over. In fact, some 7,000 South Africans die every day from the disease; that’s more than 2.5 million a year.
But rather than write a remote or scholarly book on the issue, Itano did what good journalists are supposed to do (and used to do): Talk to those most affected by the disease.
For two years, she “ate meals with them, helped wash their laundry and harvest their fields, and even occasionally slept at their houses,” she writes in an introduction.
Itano also recognizes that traditional journalistic “objectivity” and distance is hard to achieve when you’re working at that level, and hints that she finds that “ethic” suspect. As a result, she gives the reader a deeply personal, informative, affecting and true portrait of a story most Americans know nothing about.
Throughout the book, Itano bluntly exposes Western beliefs about the African AIDS epidemic for what they are: Typically uninformed and loaded with prejudice.
But it’s the personal touch of Itano’s time spent with women suffering from the epidemic that make the book more than just another Western “analysis” of a crisis in a far-flung land.
There is new hope, she says, as money, retroviral drugs and attention to the problem flow into Africa, demonstrating “what can be done if the global community works together to combat a pressing problem and (proving) wrong those who say the continent’s problems are too vast and hopeless.”
— By Clay Evans
Clay Evans, is a great story, I know that IDAs affect much the African people, they You should take some more advanced preocauçao to reduce the index.