Pep Bonet Photographer

An aids hospice is a place where people go to waste away and 101
die. In South Africa, where a world record 5.2 million people
are infected with hiv/aids and 600 die from the disease every
day, hospices are a growth industry. But the hospice I am at in
Khayelitsha, a vast and dirt-poor township in the Western
Cape, is a place of quiet hope, where people who had resigned
themselves to painful death are being offered the chance of
resurrection.
Inside the hospice an inaugural support group session is
under way with a group of eight patients who have been
selected to take part in antiretroviral therapy. In Africa this is a
luxury. A miracle cure. Much as an organ transplant might be
to a heart patient in Texas. Yet in Texas — as everywhere else
in the rich world — arv treatment is routine for hiv positive
people. A disease that continues to be fatal in Africa has been
rendered merely chronic — and largely symptom-free — in
Europe and the United States.
We are in a large room, bare save for a circle of chairs where
the support group participants are sitting quietly, the silence
broken only by a television in the corner showing a local soap
opera to which no one pays any attention. This is an important
meeting. The support group will continue to gather, on a
weekly basis, for at least the first year of the treatment, maybe
for the rest of these people’s lives. If the treatment is to be
successful, support and solidarity are almost as important as
the medication. Success, though, seems along way off for this
particular bunch. Hopefully we will see some progress later,
when the treatment has begun to take effect, but for now they
are weak and emaciated, and their minds are not all there.
These are all cases of what in the West is known as full-blown
aids.