Are we all losing focus on HIV/AIDS?

Financial crisis and growing poverty could reverse decades of HIV/AIDS progress

By Patricia Leidl, with Jean-Luc Martinage | Published in The Magazine of the Red Cross

Marjanne is so shrunken that from a distance she looks like a heap of black velvet that someone carelessly tossed onto the chaff-strewn ground. Six months ago, she and the dusty little boy she travels with—a nominal chaperone—would never have ventured down from her home in Lashkar Gah (Lash to the locals) to Nawa unaccompanied and in her case, uncovered. Today she squats balanced on two ancient ankles patiently waiting in the scorching heat: the only woman of among a group of one hundred men and two marines. What looks to be some kind of skin cancer is eating away at the tip of her nose, but her sunken black eyes are sharp and penetrating. Her purpose? To gather an allotment of cut-rate seed, a USAID-backed scheme designed to encourage local farmers to grow wheat instead of opium poppy.