My friend with HIV

Right before I left the Peace Corps, one of my closest Mauritanian friends decided to come clean to me. She'd been keeping a secret from me and her family for the last six months. She'd been diagnosed with HIV. She confided in me in a back bedroom of her husband's parents' house, while her two year old daughter played with the babysitter outside and her niece prepared lunch for us. My friend and I lay on floor together, between the mud walls, and cried and sweat until we couldn't tell the difference between the beads of salt water on our faces. We hushed our words, stifled our tears and wiped our sweat whenever her mother-in-law or anyone else would come into the room. No one else but her husband and I knew.

She told me her husband was sero-negative and she hadn't had her two year old daughter tested yet. I understood what she and I couldn't say- she didn't have the heart. She told me she'd contracted it from unsafe health care practices. She's only a pharmacist, not a nurse, but with the shortage of health care workers and the high cost of care, she'd been tending to her poor neighbor who she suspected had AIDS. She'd told me she thinks she got it from washing out the woman's sores. She holds her finger up to me and says, the infected blood must have seeped into a hangnail, that she never wore gloves. Well, this is what she told me anyhow.

However she may have encountered the virus, she'd contracted the deadly curse anyway. The kind and generous woman who'd befriended me from day one, who never used me for money, who taught me about the culture, and generously shared her meals and family love with me was handed a fate she certainly didn't deserve.

She called me yesterday to tell me she'd had another baby. She'd gone to the capital city to deliver; I think she told me through the static and delay that she'd had a Cesarean section. I asked if she would nurse and she said she would, for six months, because the water in Mauritania is too poor of quality to risk giving formula to her infant. She hasn't been taking any ARVs. She told me that she won't know if the baby is seropositive for another six months. Because of her situation, the baby still has about a one in three chance of contracting HIV as well.

Since I left, I've felt an unbearable guilt for leaving her. I haven't been good about keeping in bonded through the language barriers before. As a future MPH with a focus in international health, I'll most likely work on prevention of disease transmission for thousands of strangers in Africa during the course of my career but I can't prevent one of the ones I love the most in Mauritania from getting HIV. It's too late for her and maybe her baby, too.

So, when her credit ran out and our call ended, I lost it. I couldn't tell her how much I love her, I was at a loss for words in English, let alone the ability to find something encouraging to say in French. But when I think about her almost every day, I hope she feels and knows how much I care about her. I hope she knows from our conversations in the past that I'm dedicated to getting her and women like her the adequate care they deserve for a deadly disease that they don't deserve.