[Kenya] Poverty and tradition fuel Aids on Lake Victoria shores

from Mail and Guardian South Africa

Lucie Peytermann Asat, Kenya

On the banks of Africa's largest lake, a deadly cocktail of poverty, prostitution and tribal widow inheritance practices is fuelling a surge in HIV/Aids even as progress is made in other areas.

Here in Western Kenya where the water and fish from Lake Victoria are lifelines, communities are struggling against an alarming new rise in HIV/Aids cases that has plunged residents into despair.

"HIV/Aids is rampant," says Pitanis Ogira Ochola, the chief of the 500-inhabitant Asat beach village as fishermen unload their catches in view of several of the lake's verdant islands.

"We buried four people today," he tells a reporter on a recent visit to the area that has long held the dubious distinction of having one of Kenya's highest HIV/Aids rates despite intense campaigns to fight it.

In the nearby village of Bao, home to 200 people, chief Amos Were Ojuka has similar disturbing news.

“Aids is increasing," he says. "We have five deaths a month, many orphans and 50 widows because of HIV."

While Kenya has succeeded in reducing its national HIV prevalance rate from an estimated 14 to 7% over the past decade, the deadly disease has been stubbornly resistant and even surged around Lake Victoria.

In some lakeside villages, the rate stands at 30 and even 40%, according to Betty Okero, who co-ordinates the activities of aid agencies in western Kenya from the country's third-largest city of Kisumu.

"Sixty percent of the beds in hospitals in the Kisumu region are occupied by HIV patients," she says, adding that the devastation is compounded by the fact that one-in-three adults are unemployed.

Nearly half of the population around Kisumu – 48%, compared to 29% nationally -- lives in absolute poverty, according to United Nations statistics that hint at why HIV/AIDS has tightened its grim grip here.

The lack of jobs and money has forced many women to sell themselves to feed their families in a trend known locally as "sex-for-fish" that along with the Luo tribal tradition of widow inheritance has had a profound health impact.

"When you have no money, you must look for what is there, you must have a partner to get fish," says Ojuka, who along with other village leaders has unsuccessfully tried to stamp out such prostitution.

"But I don't have control over it, I don't know what is happening at night," he says.

Joyce Oruko, a colorful and charismatic community leader in the village of Denga, has adopted a carrot and stick approach. She and others organised a fund to keep women from engaging in "sex-for-fish".

"It used to happen on our beach and if I hear it is happening again, I will beat the man and the woman," she says as a woman nearby describes the fatal pitfalls of the practice.

"Before it was OK, because you could only get a treatable STD and you could hide it," says Denga resident Damaris Agola. "Now, with HIV, you can't hide it and you're bound to die."

Yet those cautionary words have gone unheeded by many desperate women here, a conclusion backed up by the huge number of Aids orphans in the region.

In many schools, as many as a third of pupils have lost at least one parent to the virus, according to Peter Okoth Mireri, project coordinator at Osienala, a non-profit health and environmental agency that works in the area.

"It's a major problem," he says. "You can find schools around the beaches with 20- to 30% orphans."

"Wife inheritance is also a major problem," he says, referring to the Luo tradition of widows becoming the mates of a male relative of their deceased husbands, many of whom have died of HIV/Aids and passed the disease to their spouse.