A State of Outrage

This is a story about a woman, Vuyokazi, who has been murdered by a mob in her hometown because she has AIDS. The story is a tale about how her girlfriends from school are all brought back together after her death and how they band together to form an "AIDS awareness" group, aimed at educating people about AIDS. Because AIDS is so prevalent in Africa I was surprised by this story. Although educational levels in this country are extremely low so I suppose that the people who are native to this country, especially when AIDS began popping up, were terrified of what may happen to them. There was a time in the United States when similar things (perhaps not as violent) happened to people who were found to be HIV positive. Before the disease was understood, and before it was discovered that it was not hyper-contagious, the general population was terrified that AIDS was the next plague. I remember children being forced to stop going to school and men and women losing their jobs over this disease. Sadly, in places throughout the world where violence is a lot more common, I think that this kind of "mob mentality" is a very common thing.