essay on Aids in Africa
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Time magazine reporter, Johanna McGeary, spent a month traveling South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe doing research for her February 12, 2001 cover story, Death Stalks a Continent. In this article, McGeary discusses the troubles of the people in Africa due to HIV/AIDS, where the name of the disease is taboo since it's considered shameful to have it. She tells the story of five different people affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa. She also addresses the fact that Africa's government does nothing to educate the people on AIDS/HIV or take measures to prevent the spread of it, while the African people act as if the disease doesn't exist and keep spreading it.
The article begins by telling readers about the social life in Africa. In order to give the reader insight into what it's really like to live in Africa with AIDS/HIV, McGeary recounts stories of how women risk their lives every time they decide to have sex with their husbands because their husbands work two-hundred miles away and only come home twice a year to sleep with their wives after unsafely sleeping around while on jobs or how there are teenagers who have to look after younger siblings because their parents have died of the disease they aren't even allowed to speak of. In her article, McGeary tells the story of the TB patient, the outcast, the truck driver, the prostitute, and the child in No. 17, who all have a unique story about life in Africa and AIDS/HIV. Another point brought up in the article is the one of the government not getting involved in this "secret disease."
If government does nothing to combat this disease or educate its people, how can any progress be made?..