HIV/AIDS PROGRAMS IN MOZAMBIQUE

By Paul Johnson

Published on March 2009

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I went to Mozambique in 2005 as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach Biology- at the time HIV/AIDS never crossed my mind. Despite the high HIV rate- about 18% nationally but over 25% in certain areas, the disease wasn’t immediately apparent. In fact, it took almost a year of community integration to truly realize the extent of the epidemic; how the continuous stream of obituaries posted at the school, despite stating other causes for death, were actually due to AIDS; the way nobody expected to live to be older than forty; the huge number of orphans.

I went on to spend the majority of my three years in Mozambique working on HIV/AIDS related projects with a group of local students. In the following photo essay I show the village, Ile, where I lived and worked and many of the HIV/AIDS projects that the students and I worked on.

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Paul Johnson is a first year medical student at Michigan State University, College of Human Medicine. After graduating with a BA in Biology from Kalamazoo College he joined the Peace Corps and taught high school level biology for two years in northern Mozambique with his wife, Elisabeth. During that time Paul worked extensively with local youth on HIV/AIDS prevention projects, which included the construction of a youth center. Following teaching he spent six months in Mozambique producing an educational DVD about HIV/AIDS prevention. Paul is an AMSA global health scholar, and is interested in history, photography and global development. He joined Global Pulse as editor in 2009, and can be contacted for questions or comments at pjohnson@globalpulsejournal.com

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