Much has been written about AIDS in Africa. The whole situation seems frankly pretty hopeless and the idea that Malawian met and women can get is that it is inevitable that one will contract AIDS and die an early death. HIV-positive status is even becoming a bragging right among many men, as evidenced by ongoing research (evidenced in the first article I refer to).
What does this have to do with Chiyao.org? The Malawian town of Mangochi, a majority Yawo area, is a popular spot for vendors who want to purchase fish from Lake Malawi. It is also a reputed “red light” area for traveling Malawians. (As a foreigner, I wasn’t aware of that perspective on Mangochi though I do know my current home in Mandimba, Mozambique on the border with Malaw, is also known as a red-light area due to the international transport route between the two countries).
To learn more about the situation of AIDS in Malawi and specifically how Malawians popularly talk about AIDS, I recommend reading the 2003 article “My Girlfriends Could Fill A Yanu-Yanu Bus: Rural Malawian Men’s Claims About Their Own Serostatus” by Amy Kaler. A more recent article published in 2009, “Condom Semiotics: Meaning and Condom Use in Rural Malawi“, by Iddo Tavory and Ann Swidler of University of California, is also worth a read if you are interested in following this present-day health crisis. (The second article specifically mentions that many of the interviews done for the research were conducted in Chiyao.)
A word of warning: there is frank talk about sex in these articles.
