Sylvia's Journal

The field visit to Aboisso, a town close to the Ghanaian border, took us one hour further East of Bassam. It is a busy two lane road that is part of the larger corridor that connects Lagos to Abidjan. By chance I drove back from the field visit in the rented bus rather than the MSH car as I had done on the way out. When the MSH car finally arrived back at the hotel we learned that they had avoided, by a hair’s breadth, a horrendous accident that could have ended very (very) badly) if it wasn’t for the alertness and skill of driver Alphonse. He was visible shaken even though he said he was not. His quick action had avoided the unspeakable (failli de mourir). The phrase has of course particular significance for Oumar and myself. We were both very grateful having been spared this experience this time. We are also thankful to Alphonse. An experienced and alert driver is no guarantee for accident free driving but it helps in these parts of the world.

To my great surprise we left exactly at the appointed time in the morning, not just around 8:30, which would have been good, but exactly at 8:30. Imagine that!. This turned out to be a very good thing because, with an hour drive ahead, followed by the required protocol visits, a morning is very short; too short really.

Once in Aboisso our larger group split into smaller groups. Flore and I accompanied two CCM members to the NGO Lumiere Action, an organization that receives funds from the Global Fund through CARE to help people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS manage their disease and their families. Its office is right next to lab of the general hospital. This is a good place to be because once diagnosed as sero-positive, the patient can be seen immediately by the agency’s staff. It is a wonderful example of private-public sectors working together. We were told that when the group was not on the premises, most newly diagnosed with HIV left the hospital grounds and in doing so, fell through the cracks as they returned to their communities, may be infecting others.

The staff of the agency includes a few supervisors, counselors and volunteers. The very junior and enthusiastic ‘senior’ staff is crammed into an office that is barely 2×3 meters, most of it filled with dossiers, a small table and plastic chairs. The dossiers are a mystery to me; boxes full of papers with information about patients. One wonders what will happen when the caseload really increases, as it has been of late. It is only going to go up.

The agency works with the extreme poor, people who go into debt and borrow money to pay for transport to go to a patient meeting in town. We went on a short drive to that part of town that is defined by the word ‘transit. Aboisso is the last big town before the border with Ghana. Not surprisingly the prevalence of HIV/AIDS there is high. Our hostess took us to the house of a sero-positive woman with 7 children of various fathers; the youngest child, Belem, was diagnosed as positive. She doesn’t know about the others. Some of the other children were ushered out of the simple bar structure that provides a little income to the sick and single mother; they don’t know and mom did not think they need to know. It was very humbling to be so close to the bottom of the societal pyramid. We were all touched by the devotion and caring of the agency’s chief who had clearly gotten the confidence of many people who might not have made it without her. But it is also overwhelming when you think of the number of people who need the same kind of tender loving care. It is hard to even consider the word luck, but it seemed that the woman we met was lucky in a perverse sort of way. Even in bad luck there can be good luck.