Students of the World interview ASC's Alemseged Girmay. The film will be shown at the Clinton Global Summit.

New Views on HIV in Ethiopia

Alison Fairbrother, Students of the World

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA JUNE 2006 - In June, I was one of eight young Americans who ventured from the familiarity of campus life, waved goodbye to family and friends, boarded a Boeing 747, and arrived, timid and exhausted, in Addis Ababa. At the airport, each of us had a 5:30 am Coca-Cola in a tall glass bottle, took a deep breath, and stepped outside onto Ethiopian soil. We were met by Alemseged Girmay, the program director of African Services Ethiopia, who quickly became our host, friend and mentor.

Traveling with Students of the World, a student-led organization with chapters at universities nationwide, our task was to complete a short documentary about HIV in Ethiopia to be shown at the Clinton Global Summit in September. Our aim was to make a film highlighting ASC's work at the grassroots combating the AIDS pandemic. As college students in our early twenties, we also wanted to document the virus that overwhelmingly affects our Ethiopian counterparts.

We got started by touring African Services' HIV testing centers at Shola and Mercato and interviewing Alemseged. We learned about the innovative approach African Services takes to outreach by positioning its clinics in market areas—big, colorful, vibrant centers of Ethiopian life. In the markets, relationships begin and end, friendships are forged; business is swift, and commercial sexual exchange is a huge industry. But knowledge spreads quickly, and ASC's testing and counseling process is inviting – convenient, anonymous, rapid, and free. These factors contribute to ASC Ethiopia's overwhelming success: over 33,000 clients in just three years, 40 to 50 percent of whom have no income.

Over the course of four weeks, we took our camera everywhere talking to Ethiopians on the streets and with program directors from UNFPA, WHO and UNAIDS. The outlines of a larger picture became clear: AIDS awareness in Addis Ababa is high, but knowledge and practice are rarely synonymous. Several new friends reiterated that HIV prevalence is rising in Ethiopia's countryside, and so we traveled to African Services' testing center in Kombolcha, 400 miles outside of the capital. There, we realized the importance of ASC's plan to build new VCT clinics in rural areas in northern Ethiopia. We also learned, in many heartbreaking ways, about the social stigma the virus carries with it, to so many facets of Ethiopian life.

We also saw the strength and passion ASC's staff bring to their work. We learned about blood samples over a breakfast with Mesfin Tekle, the lab technician at Shola. We had long conversations with Ejigayheu Tadesse about reproductive health and the importance of integrating care for patients with opportunistic infections and tuberculosis. Elzabet Menon spoke passionately about how crucial it is for ASC to become a distributor of anti-retroviral therapy, so that there would be no breakdown in confidentiality for the positive client. Seble Berhanu took us to the "New York Café," where we partook in our native cuisine over-looking Bole Road, where herds of muddy sheep trotted by on feeble legs.

As the four weeks drew to a close, the rest of the team began to pack their bags. I chose to stay in Ethiopia a month longer and work with African Services providing program support. I began to pick up some Amharic and spent the rest of the summer learning from clients who came to be tested, from HIV counselors, from fruit vendors, children running shoeshine businesses, and women roasting maize over smoking ashes on Haile Selassie Road. And I realized that tragedies are accompanied by hope, and that pain and suffering on the African continent do not mete out wisdom, love, or joy.