"For the last three weeks, I have been working in the township of Kranshoek, South Africa, with Anthea, a home-based caregiver. From my first visit to a patient’s house, I knew that what I was experiencing was remarkable. Just fifteen years after the end of Apartheid, here was a community of three races who were all bound by the same pandemic, HIV. Even for the patients treated for strokes or diabetes, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS is impossible for them to fully ignore. If one patient does not actually have the virus, they live next to someone who does, or the man they buy bread from has a son who goes to school with a boy who has been orphaned by it. There is always a connection. For these people, AIDS is not a statistic; it is a friend, or a brother, or an absent parent. HIV does not know the word ‘diversity’ and affects everyone it comes in contact with, regardless of his or her skin color or socio-economic status. For the Western world, it is the ‘African’s disease’, and even here, it is known to some as the burden of the impoverished and uneducated. These ideas, though, could not be more false or more pregnant with post-colonial notions of Western superiority. My own realization of this, and my limited but growing comprehension of the issues and challenges, has led me to believe that education is of the upmost importance regarding the gender, economic, age, and, especially, race-crossing nature of HIV/AIDS and the extent to which it will continue to spread and take lives if unchecked. It is the first and most important step in, if not eliminating, dramatically releasing the epidemic’s hold on both public health care infrastructure the world over and the lives of the millions of those affected." - Alexis Kidd