Monday gloom and doom

Attending an AIDS workshop in Africa is downright depressing. While Denison trained me well to be a statistic skeptic, I heard several today that if slightly skewed or not, made me want to weep for this continent.

One statistic was that 75% of the 20 million people (as of some time in 2006) who have died of AIDS were living in Africa. Also, Swaziland has close to 40% infection rate of HIV/AIDS. Almost half of the population is living with this deathly diagnosis!

I was hoping that I misunderstood these frightening numbers, since the program is entirely in French and by the time we got to the scary numbers portion of the day my brain was fried.

Unfortunately, my French served me adequately for this and other sad stats.

On the up side, it is considerably cooler on the coast than in the interior. And this five day workshop, intended to train and motivate various health workers in Peace Corps sites, is located in an airconditioned building. Mashallah.