Lane Hartill, the CRS regional information officer for West Africa, visits with Ngozi Nwega and her family. Photo by CRS staff

I’ve never hugged anyone with HIV. That all changed when I met Ngozi.

Ngozi Nwega lives down a dirt alley in a two-room concrete apartment in Benin City, Nigeria. When I entered her living room with HIV outreach workers from the health unit at the Archdiocese of Benin City, she was barefoot and smiling. She curtsied to me, showed me to the faded couch, and walked over and turned down the volume on the TV. The Curious George cartoon was much too loud.

Ngozi sat down next to me and poured her heart out: a forced marriage at 15, a husband who died after contracting HIV, a family that rejected her. Two of her children died soon after they were born. She became desperately ill. Nkechi, her oldest daughter, quit school to take care of her. Ngozi’s new husband – who paid for medical bills after she became ill – tried to strangle her, saying she would die anyway.

Ngozi told me this with the relaxed tone of someone reading the ingredients on a can of soup.

We’d only been there 10 minutes when the electricity cut out. The overhead fan stopped. And I started sweating. The room grew thick with humid heat. Perspiration poured down my back. This, I thought to myself, is what Ngozi and the kids sleep in every night.

“The man returned me to my parents,” she continued. “On the way to the village, it’s a miracle I didn’t die. When I got to the village, everyone ran from me. Even my father ran away.”

The stigma of HIV is high in Nigeria. Many believe it’s a death sentence.

Maybe it was the heat. Or maybe the rush of memories overwhelmed her. But Ngozi lost it. She cried into her blue wraparound skirt, each memory pushing out more tears. But she refused to stop telling her story. It was a testimony, she said. It was cathartic, I thought.

But then she found the Archdiocese of Benin City. CRS supports their health unit and the team that works with HIV-positive Nigerians and their children. Vivienne, an outreach worker through the archdiocese, came to Ngozi’s house and gave her rice and beans. She took the kids to the zoo. She made sure the children’s school fees were paid. And that the mosquito net was hung and Ngozi takes her antiretroviral drugs.

We walked outside her apartment and all piled onto the decaying couch. I put my arms around Ngozi and her family. I couldn’t believe that this smiling, resilient woman next to me, this woman who is my own age, had lived through all this. I couldn’t believe she shared such an intimate story with me.

Lane Hartill is Catholic Relief Services’ regional information officer for West Africa. He is currently traveling in Nigeria.

First Lady Laura Bush meets with clients of Chreso Ministries clinic, an HIV center sponsored by CRS’ AIDSRelief consortium.

‘You Need to Give Them Hope’ — One small, bright spot in the fight against HIV

U.S. First Lady Laura Bush swept through Chreso Ministries, one of the HIV clinics that Catholic Relief Services supports in Zambia, this afternoon. It was a blisteringly quick visit that ended in an hour. But by shining a spotlight on one clinic that is bravely facing an incomprehensibly large disease, she reminds the world that there is indeed good news to tell about the AIDS pandemic in Africa.

There is no hiding from the bad news here: Nearly 16 percent of Zambia’s population is HIV-positive. On the ground, that means most people are affected by the disease — either they have the virus, or friends or family members do. It is a painful everyday reality. In the past, a diagnosis was a death sentence, so people hid from the pains, the infections and the sores that covered their bodies. Stigma was too great and the reality was too difficult to manage.

But there is good news here too. At places like Chreso, free antiretroviral medications are turning around people’s lives. HIV has become chronic, instead of deadly, making people more likely to talk about the virus and face it head on. The change is palpable.

In 1996, Chreso’s executive director, Helmut Reutter, noticed how many people in his Lusaka-based church were seriously affected by – or dying of – HIV and AIDS.

“We couldn’t just keep quiet, or deny the fact of HIV,” said Reutter, who named the clinic after a Greek word for “need.” “We discovered the greatest need of our time, that being HIV and AIDS.”

Chreso started small, a voluntary counseling and testing center run from a tiny church office. But the ministry’s aspirations were larger, and Reutter and his colleagues looked for opportunities to expand their reach. CRS’ AIDSRelief consortium received a large grant from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2004. Chreso, supported by Children’s AIDS Fund, then had the opportunity to scale up the clinic’s work, and leapt at the chance.

Two years later, some 5,700 Zambians receive free medicine or other care from Chreso. Two overflowing waiting rooms are testament to the ongoing need, but atmosphere is relaxed. A mother nurses her baby. A patient calls to a visitor from across the room, cracking a joke. A receptionist smiles as another client walks in.

Paul Macek, CRS Zambia country representative, talks with Jenna Bush.

“We don’t have posters on the walls saying ‘AIDS Kills,’ because people know that anyway,” Reutter said. “You need to give them hope that there is an answer to this situation.”

That type of hope is what drives people forward here. That’s the good news that Mrs. Bush heard during her visit and will help spread, simply by being here. It is a tough story to tell, as the bad news often seems to outweigh the good. Around the world, the number of people testing positive for HIV continues to rise. But so does the number of bright spots – places like Chreso, believers like Reutter, programs like PEPFAR.

“We are a faith-based organization, and we know that God has an answer,” Reutter said. “People’s lives have been turned around.”

This dispatch was filed by Hilary Roxe, CRS communications officer for Africa. She was in Zambia during Mrs. Bush’s visit to Chreso Ministries on Thursday afternoon.

For more information about the First Lady’s visit, read the CRS press release.