Jamila

Something about the girl that comes to meet us says that she is a fighter, so I like her instantly. She’s young and slight, but her walk across the yard past the hanging shirts and the old lady pounding maize is slow, deliberate, and arthritic. There is no hesitation, no hanging back as she comes up and greets each one of us with the traditional Mozambican kiss on both cheeks before she slowly folds her small frame back down on the woven mat under the shade of a tree. She chats easily with us. Her eyes are sharp and alive. She has a shy smile that comes often, sometimes even in spite of herself. She says she’s been sick for the last two years. Her name is Jamila, she’s only 23, and what “sick” means is that she has AIDS.

Jamila says she has not been lucky. Her boyfriend left her 5 years ago when she was pregnant with their son, Kevin Clair, who now lives with his father’s family. The boyfriend went back to South Africa and she hasn’t seen him since. Jamila has been living with her mother and cousins. Then two years ago she became sick. She had pains in her chest, she felt cold and she was coughing without stopping. It got so bad, she says, that she thought she would die. Some care volunteers from World Relief convinced her to go to Caramel Hospital for treatment. Caramel is a hospital known for testing and treating AIDS patients. Most people see going to Caramel as an admission that they are infected with HIV. People are afraid to even go there, for fear of what they might be told. Here the stigma of AIDS is so frightening that your own family might disown you if they find out you are infected. So few people know what causes the disease and how it’s transmitted; they just try to avoid contact altogether. They don’t even like to talk about it. Even now Jamila is conscious of the stigma of AIDS. She tells us she was treated for tuberculosis at Caramel. Since then she has felt better, but her health has ups and downs. At the beginning of this year she spent two months in the hospital being treated for malaria.

For someone who feels so unlucky, Jamila smiles a lot. I ask her what makes her happy. She is shy about responding. After some encouragement she says that she does feel sad, but she tries not to stay that way, because she knows it would not be good for her to be both sad and sick together. She is happy when people visit her, because it helps her not to feel so alone. Her mother-in-law visits her and looks after her, and so do the neighbours who know she is sick. The volunteer who brought us, Maria, lives close enough to come over every day. There is obvious affection between the two women. Jamila says she really likes Maria’s visits. She says that without her, she would still be very sick, she wouldn’t go to the hospital, and she wouldn’t have any encouragement. She is a Muslim, but since becoming sick she hasn’t been to the mosque, and they don’t come to see her, she says. When Maria comes over she prays with Jamila and encourages her.

Everything about Jamila seems bright. She has just started back at school in Grade 7, after a five-year interruption because of her pregnancy and illness. Before she became pregnant her father wanted her to be an accountant. Now she looks at the ground and says she doesn’t hope too much, because of her age. Sometimes the way she looks off into the distance while we’re talking breaks my heart. I wonder what she is looking at. The cruelty of it is enough to make the whole world sag. She could do so much, this girl. She is far too alive to have her life attacked by such a disease and it’s a wonder she smiles at all, let alone as much as she does. I’ve always known the world is not fair; walking away from my visit with Jamila, I feel it for the first time. What is happening to her is wrong, a thing to rage against with all power. But what kind of power will it take? I wonder, feeling moved and helpless. We leave Jamila with a prayer that seems to me to thud against the clouds, and with Maria, who has sat the whole time beside her with her own gentle smile. And maybe that’s what power it takes when you’re still young, abandoned by a man, and sick with a disease that would make people shun you if they knew. Prayers to hammer the sky with and someone like Maria with enough love in her to come and sit next to you and smile like that. Like you matter.