Journalist's Journal: Life and death situation
By Di Caelers Posted Apr 1 2003
His baby-fat tummy fit snugly into the yellow hand-knitted jersey. As he held out his arms to be lifted onto the jungle gym for the photo shoot, he looked into my eyes, and his small face formed a heartbreaking smile.
It’s a picture imprinted deep in my memory. This baby, who had so little to smile about, saw such pleasure in a short interaction with a woman he’d never seen.
Journalists do it so often: play with children to get them to smile for countless stories. But most of those children have homes, families, schools and probably long lives to look forward to.
Sivu has none of that, and soon he will be dead.
Children are a painful part of reporting on AIDS in Africa. I cover HIV and AIDS in the Western Cape, South Africa, which is arguably one of the best-off regions.
Like journalists who have covered famine, war and other human disasters across the globe, local writers find it increasingly difficult to balance the horrors of their jobs and their happy, healthy families.. Aside from the emotions, journalists must pick their way through a minefield of ethics.
In South Africa, AIDS is still mostly a dirty word; at times, it’s one not even vocalized. Some communities simply lift four fingers in reference to the cause of death. The stigma is so serious that people are thrown out of their homes, ostracized by neighbors and, in one particularly tragic case, stoned to death. The shame colors everything about reporting on the pandemic in South Africa.
Here, HIV/AIDS is probably the one story where journalists can never let the lure f the front-page headline determine their approach.
Decisions must be made in collaboration with not only the person living with AIDS, but also their counselor and sometimes their medical practitioner. Using names is a case of checking and re-checking.
For example, Cape Town’s morning newspaper published a picture of a child receiving anti-retroviral therapy last year with unfortunate results. The person who gave permission was the child’s caregiver and not his mother. When the mother’s family recognized the child from the newspaper, the mother and child were thrown out of their home.
However, capturing the tragedy of the pandemic by reflecting the real-life stories is not impossible.
In Cape Town, people are encouraged to share their stories by the provincial health department and Médecins Sans Fronti`eres, Doctors Without Borders. And these people do so freely, anxious to share their successes to help break down the stigma. Doctors and medical staff, as well as scientists, are open to talking to the media.
There is also a high-profile AIDS activist group, the Treatment Action Campaign, whose members keep the issues surrounding the pandemic as high profile as possible. Most campaign members are empowered to speak out, whether they are lucky enough to be on treatment or not.
Among government health authorities, there is often a major split. While the national government answers only those questions that are asked — in as few words as possible, the Western Cape provincial government is quite the opposite. And it is our job to pressure those in positions of power.
When scientists and doctors are pressured by the government to hold back information, it gets reported. When the Treatment Action Campaign takes the government to court to ensure mother-to-child HIV prevention is rolled out across the country, it gets reported. When men rape young girls and children believing they will be cured of AIDS if they have sex with a virgin, it is reported.
Journalists have a powerful role to play in shaping people’s perceptions about HIV/AIDS, not only in terms of putting a human face to the pandemic, but also through the provision of accurate information about its causes, spread, impact and prevention of the disease.
Collaboration between journalists and health workers is the main solution to making sure real stories get out. Here, few health journalists actually have medical backgrounds. We came into the job naive and had to gain our knowledge as we went along.
Liz Clarke, AIDS writer for Independent Newspapers South Africa, says it’s not a “very palatable job,” but one we’re probably stuck with for a long time. It’s a reflection not only of our personal commitment, but also the fact that it’s not a job too many colleagues would swap us for.
Perhaps the most painful part is knowing that urgent government intervention could give these people hope.
Lynne Altenroxel, health writer at The Star in Johannesburg, says, “I think covering AIDS is more emotionally draining because one knows that the government could do so, so much to ease the plight of infected people, but is doing so little to help them.”
Yet, covering the politics is probably the only thing about the AIDS pandemic that any us were really trained to do.
Only one trauma counseling session exists for journalists at Independent Newspapers, which American journalist Huntly Collins arranged earlier this year.
I remember finding it excruciating to see the pain of the writers around the table, and to confront my own.
Present at the meeting was Liz Clarke, who has been around since long before I started out as a journalist 20 years ago.
We were each given a lump of clay and asked to mold it into something that epitomized for us the AIDS pandemic.
She modeled a small, dark cave.
When it came to her turn to explain, tears fells freely from Clarke’s eyes as she told the story of visiting a small, run-down home in rural Swaziland.
“It was dark as we entered,” Clarke says. “In the gloom, we found a mother who was dying, in the final stages of AIDS, trying to nurse a tiny baby of about six months old.”
The woman’s three-year-old son sat beside her, she said. When his mother egan to cry, he fetched a shawl and gently put it over his mother and the baby.
“They hadn’t eaten for three days, but the compassion of that little boy for his mother and his sibling was heartbreaking. He could still think about and worry about his family, it was incredible,” Clarke says.
Clarke told me it was a moment she hoped not many others would have to experience. For her though, “it is one of those lasting memories as a writer that stay with you.”
Dr. Helgo Schomer, University of Cape Town academic and registered psychologist who runs the Institute of Behavioral Health in Cape Town, says the pain lies specifically in the deaths of the “young and beautiful” —those you don’t expect to die.
His advice is sensible: “You can’t rescue every child you see, you can’t get involved with every family you meet.”
Cape Town freelance journalist Bronwen Muller recently visited St. Mary’s Hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, where more than 75 percent of admissions are people with HIV/AIDS. Her story indicates the enormous difficulty of separating your own life and the death in this country where about 4.7 million people are infected with HIV.
Muller remembers watching a mother whose baby was struggling to breath.
“I just wanted to tell her to pick her baby up, to cuddle her. I felt it was inappropriate; I felt so helpless,” Muller says.
It’s the faces of the children destined to die too soon that stay with you forever.
Journalists here are at the cutting edge of this mass loss of life, where one-on-one encounters collect in your memory.