In April last year, I traveled with one of my closest friends to Zambia. We visited projects created collaboratively by World Bicycle Relief, World Vision and organizations that address gender-based violence and HIV in that southern African country.
These organizations receive funding from nations, foundations and individuals dedicated to eradicating HIV. The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, is one such donor. As our government leaders have labored to cut the deficit, advocates for international development worked to disabuse Americans of the false notion that 10 to 20 percent of our federal budget goes toward humanitarian aid. The actual number is just over 1 percent.
In Zambia, where HIV/AIDS statistics are crushing, I saw how some of that money is used.
More than 1 in 7 Zambian adults lives with HIV. Life expectancy at birth is just 39 years. My friend and I are both Americans and over 40. It wasn’t lost on us that because of the accident of where we happened to have been born, we can reasonably expect to live twice that long.
One morning, we visited a rural “coordinated response center” where girls and women who have been raped or otherwise abused receive legal, medical and psychological assistance. Most, if not all, of the young women we met that day were HIV positive, as were their children. Rape in rural areas such as the one we visited is rampant. A traditional belief that intercourse with a virgin will cure a man of HIV fuels sexual violence and the spread of HIV.
Antiretroviral drugs, or ARVs, are distributed at the center. These lifesaving medications restore and protect the body’s ability to fight off illness and thwart HIV’s attempts to replicate. In addition to distributing ARVs and addressing the immediate needs of abuse survivors, the local staff at the center works to educate men and women about HIV prevention and to change societal customs that victimize girls and women.
That day, through a translator, I heard women tell personal stories of abuse and violence. While gently stroking her young daughter’s face, one mother described surviving abuse from her husband and how one night, he beat her and left home with their baby. The baby was later found near the side of a road.
The young mother detailed the ways the one-stop center had assisted her family. Her injuries were treated at the clinic and her child was examined by doctors. Police officers brought her husband in to be questioned. She and her husband received marital counseling and he met with a male elder from the community to discuss the need to treat women with respect.
Several months later, the family was back together. Her husband was no longer violent with her. He had learned to manage stress and other mental health issues appropriately. The counselor remarked that the situation had been very well resolved.
“If we were in Chicago, I’d want her to jump a Greyhound bus and move far away,” I told my friend. “You know, grab the kids. Disappear. Find a job as a waitress at a diner in Arizona or something.”
But this was a very different landscape: Divorce isn’t socially acceptable and as a single woman without possessions, assets or papers, she would have been even more vulnerable to abuse. Reconciliation with her husband was a best-case scenario for her and for her child. Woman after woman told similar stories of restored health, relationships and finances after interventions by staff at the center.
I recently heard Dr. Geeta Rao Gupta, a senior fellow at the Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program, speak at a Chicago Council on Global Affairs program on HIV. Gupta spoke about there not being a “cookie-cutter approach” to managing HIV globally. As she spoke about “context-specific” solutions and building “AIDS-competent communities,” I thought about that little center, off a red dirt road, in Zambia.
After we said our goodbyes to the women who had shared their stories, we got into our van and drove away. As I waved goodbye, I noticed a logo painted on the side of the center. Under it were the words, “USAID: From the American People.” Over the past weeks, as members of Congress engaged in the difficult work of reducing spending, they kept our commitment — small as it is — to humanitarian aid. I’m grateful. The world is a better place for it.
