Where Have All the Swazis Gone?

At the Hands at Work project in Swaziland, a woman in her late fifties named Nomsa is feeding almost a thousand orphans & AIDS patients on a tiny budget. The area she works in is incredibly rural and mountainous, and her volunteers literally carry the food to homes on their backs. They don’t even have money for a vehicle.

Today the Globe and Mail published a story stating a census just discovered Swaziland’s population is 30% lower today than they expected it to be 20 years ago (pre-AIDS) when they estimated how the country’s people would naturally grow. 30% of Canada is 9 million.

The story explains the state of HIV in Swaziland this way: “ This country has the world's highest rate of infection: 26 per cent of adults, 43 per cent of pregnant women, a staggering 49 per cent of young women between the ages 25 and 29. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 in 1997 to 31 in 2004, the lowest rate in the world. Only one in four people will live to the age of 40.”

How did it get so bad? “A toxic mix of factors combined to make the epidemic so bad here: a highly infectious and virulent strain of the virus circulating in the population; a culture that condones, even encourages, promiscuity and polygamy in men, while denying women the right to refuse to have sex or insist on the use of condoms; a limited economy that relies on sending workers away from home for long stretches to work in highly infected South Africa; and a government, led by a playboy king with an ever-expanding stable of wives, that has denied the scale of the problem, and, while people were dying, poured funds into luxury-car purchases and highway expansions.”

Read the whole article.