"I don’t think I have ever concentrated so hard."
Mike Geddes of streetfootballworld tells the story of Lerato, 15, from Lesotho. He also relates his own experience of being tested for HIV at a Vodafone Test Your Team event.
On the table next to me, a drop of my blood is seeping along a piece of paper held in a plastic strip. Halfway up the strip is a small window. If a tiny, blue line the width of my fingernail appears there, I am HIV positive.
From just outside the tent come the gasps and cheers of the football field, but it could be a light-year away. The tent keeps off the worst of the African sun but the sweat is still blurring my eyes, fixed on the tiny window. Suddenly, I’m aware that Maneo, my counsellor, is talking to me again.
“If this test says that you are HIV positive” she says “What do you think you will do?” I blink. Swallow. Try to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth. What would I do? I look back down at the strip, ticking away on the table. Five minutes to wait. I try to imagine how it would feel if the news was bad. I try to imagine how it would feel to be going through this at 15, instead of 30. I try to imagine how it would feel to be Lerato.
Lerato is seventeen. She lives in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, a mountain kingdom rising up into the clouds out of South Africa. It’s beautiful, poor, and it’s being destroyed by Aids. Anti-retroviral drugs are available free in Lesotho to people living with HIV and Aids, but many people will never know because the very idea of getting tested is inconceivable. To be diagnosed as HIV positive is to be given a death sentence.
Many choose simply not to know. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. But what you don’t know is killing this country. 23% of the population is HIV positive, and with many people having several regular sexual partners but little knowledge of the realities of the disease, the consequence of this ignorance is devastating.
“Some people believe that if you find out you are positive, you are just going to die soon” says Lerato, a petite and irrepressibly smiley teenager. “That’s why so many people don’t get tested, because they think they would rather not know about it”.
Three years ago Lerato decided that she rather would know. She sat and waited, a tissue blotting the blood from her fingertip. And she found out she was HIV positive. For many people this news would be overwhelming; a reason to give up or to deny it entirely. “I was a little scared, but then I saw that this is reality and I decided I wouldn’t let it change me” she says. “In fact, I decided to use it as an advantage”.
There is a huge stigma around getting tested here. An ordinary, 14-year-old boy is very unlikely to summon the courage to go alone to a hospital or clinic to get tested. Lerato is definitely not ordinary.
That morning I watched as she picked up a microphone and strode confidently out over the grass to a burst of applause from the hundreds of children sitting on the threadbare field in downtown Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. She only briefly glanced at her notes as she introduced herself, and talked about what its like to be HIV positive.
Lerato works with Kick4Life, an organisation which uses football to break down the stigma that surrounds getting tested, and to educate young people about the realities of HIV and Aids.
“It’s best of people hear this kind of thing from someone who’s been through it” she says. “Sometimes people tell them something because they have been told to say it, but I tell them that this is how it is, because I am living this experience”.
Kick4Life's ‘Test Your Team’ events bring football together with HIV testing. Kids have come from all over Maseru to take part in the football tournament being played out across four pitches. Right alongside, queues of children are waiting outside the small testing tents, talking to counsellors from local paediatric Aids clinics. In between the football, specially-designed games teach the children about the disease, how it spreads, and how to avoid it. The aim is to create a ‘positive peer pressure’ around getting tested.
By the end of the day, seven of the children staring up at Lerato from the grass that morning will know that they, like her, are HIV positive. But thanks to Kick4Life, they will know what to do. They will know where and how they can get treatment, they will know they can talk to someone who has gone through the same thing.
“I tell them if they have any questions they can just come and talk to me” says Lerato, on her way to talk to another group. “I’m so very happy. I’m loving myself and I love life!”
Stepping outside the tent, I take a couple of deep breaths. Of course, I was pretty confident the test would be negative, but it was still one of the longest five minutes of my life. How would it feel to go through this as a teenager, alone, not knowing what might happen and what it might mean? Would I have the courage? I don’t know. But I know how much it would help to have someone like Lerato by my side.
