I just had a conversation with a local guy who helps run HIV awareness training for students, which includes condom instruction. He’s born again. Does your church prohibit condoms? I asked. We can’t talk about them, he replied, because that would bring sex into people’s minds. If a woman in your church was married to a man who is HIV positive what would you advise her? She must pray to Jesus, he replied. And she should have unprotected sex with her HIV + husband and pray to Jesus? Yes. All things are possible with Jesus. What if the woman was someone you really cared about and wanted to live, like your mother or sister- someone you’d really be sad if they died. There are two ways to die, one of the flesh, the other if you’ve accepted Jesus, you go home to Jesus. So if the woman has unprotected sex and prays to Jesus but then dies of AIDS then goes home to Jesus it’s not that sad? Yes, that’s right.

I had to ask, of course; doesn’t your job conflict with your religious beliefs? But he’d found a way that it didn’t (of course people here desperately need work)

I remember us Americans having such conversations with nuns and priests that we came across when we first got here, and being so outraged and exasperated.

Feeling that same outrage now, but then I think, well maybe it’s good he’s working in an HIV awareness NGO even if a contradiction, because he represents what I think a majority of people here believe. They are what people are hearing every week in church, at funerals, in schools, at home. it's not fringe, it's mainstream. So getting exasperated seems a futile reaction. Be happy someone’s enlightening you to how people here are thinking about things.