As dusk turns to darkness, a group of women wait in the shadows, eyeing a boldly lit truckers' bar. Here at the crossroads, road-weary long-haul drivers stop for the night, heading for the bars in search of beer and women. Most nights, Inchope's female entertainers enter with guitars, tambourines and sexual come-ons. But tonight, they come carrying condoms, and the songs they sing are about preventing the spread of AIDS. In this beautiful, beleaguered African country of 19 million, nearly 2 million people, or one in eight, are HIV-positive -- among the highest rates of infection in the world.
Along the Beira Corridor, Mozambique's main commercial conduit, local infection has risen to catastrophic levels -- above 24 percent. In the bars and clubs clustered along the road, the HIV virus is passed from truckers to prostitutes and back to other truckers, and then on to family members. Having survived brutal colonial rule, floods and famine, and a year civil war, Mozambicans now find themselves ravaged by AIDS. The pandemic has hit sub-Saharan Africa harder than anywhere on the planet, a fact underscored when U.
President George W. Bush, during his trip to Africa last week, urged South African president Thabo Mbeki to take more aggressive steps to fight the disease. As denial and bureaucratic red tape block aid and action, citizens' groups like Inchope's sex workers are playing an increasingly important role in the struggle to prevent the HIV virus from spreading.
The distance from the capital city of Maputo to Beira, Mozambique's key Indian Ocean port, is perhaps miles. Yet the loose network of roads between them is so pocked and rutted that it can easily take three days to travel by car. Instead, like anyone with hard currency here, I fly north to the sweltering colonial port, the starting point of the Beira Corridor. At the airport I'm met by a friend, Jose, a former fighter with FRELIMO, the resistance movement that battled Mozambique's Portuguese rulers and ushered in a curious Marxist-Leninist system after the colonialists abruptly departed in After years of teaching high school science in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jose and his wife, a California nurse, recently returned to Mozambique with the idea of making a contribution to its future.
At the Beira docks, truckers are loading their rigs with merchandise before heading east for the long haul to Zimbabwe, Malawi and the African interior. As we head out of town, Jose grows despondent: Along the waterfront, the once-elegant s hotels, built by the Portuguese and nationalized after independence, are dilapidated and abandoned except for homeless squatters. Their campfires glow inside the walls, giving the hotels the appearance of a warren of caves.
