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“Not on the goddamn bed spread,” she said, and I laughed in embarrassment. Long after the candle burned out, I lay awake.
How ironic that soon I’d be demonstrating correct condom use to Timo and his classmates.
***
The next Saturday I woke before the rooster scratched his talons against my corrugated-metal roof. In candlelight I dressed and boiled water for tea. With the excess water I washed my face. While the principal and his family slept, I struck out on the sandy paths that cut through a desiccated forest. The sun sat large and red above bare scrub brush and trees. Winter in Namibia was nothing more than a long dry cool spell.
An hour later I stood by a twelve-foot termite mound, where the tracks of two village roads merged. Soon Timo appeared, wearing jeans, a red T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses he and his friends had passed between them all week. We continued north, cutting through fallow fields, passing derelict churches with tin roofs and brush walls.
I asked Timo what excuse he’d given his family. In a subsistence farming culture, he likely had a dozen chores to complete that day.
“You know,” he said, shrugging and dropping his head, and I knew he hadn’t told anyone. We walked on.
I wondered what the principal would say if he knew I was taking Timo to get tested, and that I’d volunteered. After all the essays we’d studied by HIV-positive people, class speeches and presentations, guest speakers and club meetings, how could I refuse an HIV test? All through my first year I struggled at Hallelujah, with the English curriculum, the language barrier, the fact that there were only a handful of textbooks per class of forty students. I knew I wasn’t teaching well. But during a Peace Corps training session I stumbled across a manual entitled Teach English, Prevent AIDS. It changed how I thought about pedagogy. We could use AIDS awareness to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, and we could use English to explore the stigma surrounding AIDS, dispel myths, discuss why people have sex, and learn how some HIV-positive people have accepted their status. Getting tested was a common motif in the texts and guest lectures. That was the key to “living positively.” Surely the curriculum would’ve been more powerful coming from a Namibian teacher, but I was the only ninth- and tenth-grade English teacher, and I was the outsider.
Tenth grade was a coming-of-age in Namibia. At the end of the year Timo would take a multi-subject test to determine the fate of his formal education. If he passed, he’d enroll in one of the residential senior secondary schools in the towns. If he failed, his schooling was effectively over. Typically only fifty percent of tenth graders nationwide passed. In the previous year, only twenty percent of Hallelujah’s had. Those who failed brewed and sold beer at their families’ shebeens or labored in their families’ fields or at their cattle posts.
In an essay Timo wrote about how he dreamed of passing the tenth- and twelfth-grade exams, then studying at the University of Namibia, and one day earning an advanced degree in South Africa. If he failed, he wouldn’t despair. He’d move to the coastal city Swakopmund, where a relative operated a taxi company. There, he’d learn to drive, and one day, he dreamed, he’d become a long-haul trucker who’d service cities throughout southern Africa.
Hot and sweaty, we tromped for another hour through deep sand, flies trailing us like capes. Finally we reached the B1 tar road, the only north/south highway that spanned the country. A taxi took us forty miles north to Ondangwa, a bustling one-road town of flashy strip malls, shiny banks, and hawkers selling slabs of meat hanging from tree branches. We took another taxi to Oshakati, a sprawling city intersected by a series of dry canals and drainage ditches. Timo and I then wove through a neighborhood of one-story single-family homes.
The New Start Center sat on a sand lot with six waist-high trees. It was a two-story building with a white façade bordered by a ten-foot fence spiraled with razor wire. Four women lounged on the stoop. One plaited another’s hair. Around the comb pick in her mouth, she said, “You’re welcome here.” Timo and I stood outside the gate.
“Come in,” she called, waving us toward the door, “come in.”
Posters and pamphlets lined an entryway that smelled of fresh paint and linoleum. The counselors crowded behind a receptionist’s desk and fawned over us, the only clients in the building. The woman with the pick explained that before testing we had to give names so the staff could refer to us. She assured us that the names didn’t have to be our real ones. I offered Alena, a nickname from the principal’s family, and Timo gave Gazza, a popular Namibian musician.
The woman explained that after choosing to be tested, whether the results ultimately turn out positive or negative, people have a chance at a new beginning, to live their lives to the fullest. By receiving counseling, she continued, they show they want to assess their lives, take control of their futures. After pre-test counseling, blood would be drawn and then we’d return in a week for the results and post-test counseling.
“We live far away,” I said. “Can you come back next Saturday, Timo?”
With a wry smile he looked at me. Our eyes met. “Who is Timo?” he asked. “Me, I am Gazza.” He laughed aloud, and to the women he mischievously said, “My friend, he’s very nervous.”
I gave him a pained, apologetic nod. He was right: I was nervous, more nervous than he. There was no backing out now. The woman led us upstairs, Timo to one room, me to another. Burglar bars lined the windows; the walls were a sterile white. I sat in a plastic lawn chair beside a folding table.
Soon the door clicked open and a woman in her early forties entered. Half of her hair was woven into tight cornrows capped in plastic beads. The other half stood in profusion. The skin of her round face was blistered and pockmarked. She extended her hand and I took it. Her skin was soft and lithe. She sat and smiled and looked at me for what felt like a long time.
Finally she said, “Alena, my name is Queenie. Tell me why you’ve come here today?”
“To get tested.”
“Why?” Irises as dark as the pupils, her eyes held mine.
A cliché came easily: “Everyone should know their HIV status.”
“Have you been tested before?”
“Two and a half years ago.”
“Will you share the result of that test with me?”
“Negative.”
“Have any factors put you at risk since then?”
My eyes swept past hers. She leaned forward.
“I’ve been sexually active.”
She asked how many partners I’d had. She asked if, to my knowledge, my partners had ever been tested, if I’d ever been tested with a partner, if I’d used protection, how often, and what type. I answered with short sentences. All the time Queenie watched me, smiling weakly.
She asked if I’d ever been infected with a sexually transmitted disease. As she spoke, her cheeks stretched and relaxed, and so did the blisters. It looked painful.
She asked, “Have you ever contracted an STD?” All at once I realized the rash was a sign that her immune system was failing. Queenie had AIDS.
She asked if I’d like a glass of water.
Then, she said, “Tell me the name of the STD you contracted.”
***
In the dormitory bathroom my friends and I played a game called poops. While defecating in adjacent stalls, we balled up fresh toilet paper to toss over the stall wall, and you won if your ball dropped between an opponent’s legs, into the bowl.
Pants around my ankles, toilet paper ball in hand, I saw a patch of pustules around the base of my penis. I froze. I tried to pop one like a zit, but the top came off in a hard lump, like dried paste, and a thick drop of blood traced down my penis and dripped into the bowl. I played on, tossing ball after ball over the wall, careful to give the appearance that nothing was wrong.
Weeks later the pustules hadn’t receded. My family doctor asked me how many “honeys” I’d been with. I told him the truth, but added the lie, “I’ve been safe.” He said it could be folliculitis, an inflammation of the hair follicle, and prescribed a course of antibiotics that had no effect. Then he referred me to a specialist.