By Henning Mankell, the author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries and director of Teatro Avenida in Mozambique (THE GUARDIAN, 14/10/06):
Few things make me wake in the early hours. In Sweden we call the time between four and five in the morning "the hour of the wolf". According to folklore that was the hour when most people died and most people were born. But that was long before the hospitals stopped admitting women to give birth outside office hours.There is, however, one thing that wakes me up. And that is my fear in relation to Aids - the fear that people in the western world still do not understand the impact of the pandemic. Since I have spent a lot of my time over the last 20 years in Mozambique, my concern is for this country and the African continent. But I am certain that what I say is just as true about India, for example, or countries in eastern Europe.
We don't know what is going on because we do not want to know. Too many people are still thinking about "us" and "them" when relating to Aids. We are not dying, they are. What is mostly a chronic disease in the rich part of the world is undoubtedly deadly in poor countries. But there must be a single "we" when we look at Aids. It is a problem for us all. Humanity cannot confront epidemics in any other way than with perfectly open eyes, whoever is being hit.
We are stupid if we believe that this galloping pandemic will not reach us. It will. But I wake up in the early mornings and think: we refuse to see that this is our problem. Still we repeat the mantra: they die, not us, they die, not us.
There are some hospitals in South Africa where more than half of the patients are HIV positive. They are dying. In the same hospitals half of the nurses are also infected. Sooner or later we will have to ask: who is finally going to take care of whom?
There are more African doctors working in Europe than on the whole African continent. But who can blame all the nurses going to Britain from South Africa or Kenya when you look at the salaries and remember that many of these nurses will have an extended family of maybe 15 people to take care of. Count the number of Malawian doctors in a European city such as Manchester. Then count how many Malawian doctors are working in Malawi. Guess the result.
These are facts and they are disgusting. And it becomes worse when you hear it said that people are free to move and find work where they are better paid. Is there really anyone who believes that all these nurses or doctors would have left if they did not have to?
Of course we have all the power in the world to do something about it. We could, for example, give specific amounts of money in aid - money to boost the salaries of nurses and doctors, so that they can stay where they are needed most.
It has been done before. When the Soviet Union broke down, there were many Russian doctors in Mozambique without anyone paying their salaries. Sweden went in and took over. The most important thing was to keep these doctors working, not where the money came from. I strongly believe that the idea of solidarity has to be redefined for our times - especially in relation to Aids.
There are two laws that I have formulated when talking about us and Aids: whatever we do in relation to Aids we will always do too little; and whatever we do will always be done too late. But this should not be an excuse for failing to do what we could have done yesterday. One of the most important tools we could put in the hands of people in poor countries is to ensure that every child in the world gets a book to teach them the ABC and basic literacy. I have seen too many young people being infected and dying before the age of 20. They didn't stand a chance of getting the necessary information about health because they were never offered the chance to learn the alphabet.
It is a shame that hangs over us all that today, in 2006, we have not solved the problem of illiteracy. We have the logistics, we have the resources - but still it is not done.
Let's approach it another way, then. Put half a euro on every book sold, an "ABC tax" that is earmarked to be part of the struggle against illiteracy. Who would refuse to buy that book? Nobody, I say. The reader knows what it means not to be able to read. And would he or she not want everyone else to have that same capacity?
I wake up in the early mornings, and I force myself to think: everything is still possible. Nothing is too late. Yet.