week 7 - Kisenyi

Location: Kampala, Kisenyi
As part of my hip-hop project, I am holding a series of “workshop sessions.” These workshop sessions were held to bring together artists and community members interested in discussing their knowledge of how HIV/AIDS is transmitted, who is most at risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS, general issues of stigma surrounding HIV+ people, etc. Based on these conversations, we have been able to generate new creative content for the album.

The workshop sessions have been very interesting for me, as they have exposed me to certain people and areas of Kampala that I would otherwise have never been exposed to. For example, I have so far held two sessions in Kisenyi, where the largest slum in Uganda is located. I have met with several groups of people during the “ghetto tours” that I have held. I always interact with the street children who live in the slum, many of whom already have drug problems at ten years old, have been abused by their parents, or who had no place to go once their parents died or were killed. One child I interviewed was fourteen years old and pregnant and sleeping outside in the ghetto, suffering from drug dependency and with no place to go. I also visited the small, windowless room where three sex workers and their three children lived, and spoke to them about their lives and their experiences with HIV/AIDS. There was one girl who I interviewed, however, whose experiences stand out the most. The following is a brief description of her experiences:
At only thirteen years old, her life is already filled with experiences that would leave anybody shaken and traumatized. She lives on the street in the slum, and cannot sleep without worrying about being raped in the night. Her worst fear, in fact, is being raped, and her worst fear has become reality on several occasions. She showed me the scars and bruises from only a couple days prior, when some men beat her because of her refusal to comply with their demands. Luckily, she is HIV negative, but she knows many people who are positive, and she told me how the virus is spread so easily in the slum. There are those in the slum who knowingly spread the virus, often due to lack of protection, lack of knowledge, rape, lack of care, or because it is necessary to make some money in whatever way is necessary.

As with many of our experiences here, it is these types of experiences that make all of our problems seem so minor in comparison.