It turns out that although we’re quite a mixed group, we share the common goal of wanting to learn how to care for HIV-positive people. More than half of the group are health-care professionals, with the rest, besides me, being volunteers. All of them are going out into the field to deal with unknown patients, mostly homosexual men. I’m the only one considering bringing an HIV-positive baby into my home and the only one for whom this is personal.

Courtney fiddles with the overhead projector and cues a slide. “Right, they say that the first rule of war is to know your enemy. So, here it is. Your first look at it. This is a 3-D rendering of the HIV virus. Don’t be fooled by how innocuous it looks. It’s a hateful little bastard.”

The picture branded onto the screen shows what could be a ball of clay with dozens of bolts embedded in it. She’s right, it doesn’t look all that dangerous but I know better. I think back to the emaciated child with his spindly legs and sunken cheeks that I saw in the orphanage that day. Anything that could do that to a baby has to be completely without mercy.

Courtney gives us a moment to look at the slide and then launches into the syllabus. I struggle along with everyone else to keep up with her. Every half an hour or so, she marches to the whiteboard and adds a new term to the growing list. I copy them all down and size them up as I try to figure out who the biggest villains are: HIV, AIDS, TB, opportunistic infections, lesions, diarrhea, pneumonia, cryptococcal meningitis, toxoplasmosis, candidiasis, or Kaposi’s sarcoma.

The terms swarm around my mind, as real to me as fire-breathing dragons and hobgoblins. They’re the stuff of fantasy and nightmares.

“AIDS is no longer a homosexual disease limited to men, it’s now predominantly a women’s and children’s disease. The number of recorded HIV infections in South Africa has grown by more than sixty percent in the past two years and that’s just the recorded cases. With the huge stigma surrounding the disease, deaths are being attributed to TB and pneumonia on death certificates so that funeral parlors won’t refuse to handle the bodies. I suspect the real figures are double the official ones. We’re heading for a pandemic, there’s no doubt about it.”

The only man in the room, Julian, puts his hand up and then speaks before being called on. “So, what can we do to stop it? Everything we’ve talked about is how to manage secondary infections and palliative care. How can we stop this disease?” His question seems apt, considering men think everything can be fixed while women just try to make the best of bad situations.