In another part of San Francisco, I accompanied the pastor of a local church on her outreach rounds. In a seedy flophouse, we met one of her parishioners. He hadn't been to church in weeks and the pastor was concerned. After she knocked, a painfully thin man opened the door. His sunken cheeks made his eyes seem huge. He invited us into his spare but surprisingly cozy and neat room. The few plants he maintained gave it warmth and a wonderful afternoon light was coming in from a window. On the wall was a huge photo of a naked young man in a cowboy hat. He reached under his bed and from a box took a photograph of his teenage daughter. When he admitted he was gay, he was excommunicated from the Mormon Church, and his wife divorced him.
He hadn't seen his daughter for years. He desperately wanted to speak with her before he died, to tell her how proud he was of her and how much he loved her. He handed the picture to the pastor. We both commented how nice she looked and how proud he must be. For an instant there was a twinkle of parental pride in his eye. I took one frame and the twinkle was gone. He died several weeks later without seeing his daughter.
I went to India. At that time, AIDS was just getting established, thanks to the booming sex trade in cities like Bombay. There were at least 70,000 female prostitutes, and more if you count the transvestites and young boys. The prostitutes were a very high-risk group. Some of the health officials I worked with estimated two-thirds of them were HIV positive. The brothels where they lived and worked were tall, narrow buildings. Each floor was controlled by a different pimp and housed four to six women. Thin curtains separated the cots where they slept and worked. At that time, sexual transactions cost 25 cents. Since the prostitutes had to pay $1.00 per day for their beds, each woman had to service four men a day to break even. The women knew about HIV/AIDS and wanted to use condoms for their safety, but the customers resisted, threatening to go somewhere else if they insisted.
Many of these women had been abused by relatives, brutalized and raped. They were no longer suitable for marriage in that culture. Their own fathers had sold some of the women to brothels. It was a hellish situation. Women and girls arrived daily in this part of town, knowing it was the end. They were lost souls looking for mercy.
I must have looked very lost. Twice men approached me while I was photographing on the streets, asking if I wanted to work. I'm part Japanese. With my fair skin, I look similar to the Nepalese women favored by Indian men. To my relief, before I could attempt to answer them, the health worker I was with would rush over and gently explain I working with him.
It was a delicate situation. I had only a few days to get this portion of the story done and I needed access to this tightly knit community. The women are so controlled they are effectively enslaved to the brothels. If I or the health worker guiding me insulted any of the brothel owners, word would get around quickly and any chance of access would vanish.
In one of the brothels, a young woman insisted I share a piece of her birthday candy. Her friends gathered around, and not wanting to insult anyone, I took a very small bite to please her and put the rest in my pocket. Within hours, I had severe diarrhea and a high fever. I was incredibly sick for several days. I called my husband up in the middle of the night. I needed him to contact Dr. Wolf, a tropical medicine specialist in DC, to see what to do. I had the powerful antibiotic Cipro with me, but I'd been cautioned about taking it because of side effects. Hearing about my situation, Dr. Wolf advised me to take it immediately. Within hours, I was recovering, and I was able to work the two remaining days I had in India.
Once I finally gained entrance to a couple of the brothels, conversations always and inevitably seemed to turn to me. The women wanted to know about my husband, my children, and me. Did I have a house with grass around it? Was that grass green? The questions seemed odd, but I realized the whole world for these women was one rented cot, with sheets for a wall, and a shared hole for a bathroom. Their home was on a dirty street, paved with garbage. Every street, for as far as these women would ever travel, was lined with the same gray, rundown structures containing women with the same sad stories. A house with green grass must have seemed like an unattainable fantasy for them, as removed from their lives as theirs was from mine.
By the time I finished the AIDS portion of the story I felt like a refugee from a war zone. For months afterwards, any news report on AIDS brought me to tears. I had witnessed so many people struggling and dying. I tried hard to get past the cliches of this disease, to show it affecting real people with real lives--a proud father, a kind lover, a wife who still lived with her gay husband and dying gay son. I wanted to photograph people living with AIDS, not dying from it.
I met Paul Teffler on my first trip to Africa. He was working in Sierra Leone, researching the origins of AIDS. Tess, his wife, worked for the Centers for Disease Control on Lassa Fever, a hemorrhagic virus that is cousin to Ebola. In 1993, Lassa was found around Kenema, a politically unstable region. Writer Peter Jaret and I were among the first groups of Americans allowed back. Americans had been evacuated months earlier, when a U.S. citizen had been hunted down and killed in front of his wife and children. Six Catholic sisters were killed for their vehicle. Sierra Leone was still shaky when I arrived. One day I was stopped at a checkpoint along with two African members of the Lassa Fever team. A very young police officer saw my camera, pointed his AK-47 at my face, and arrested all three of us. We were held for hours. The shaken faces of my two companions scared me more than anything else--they knew how quickly incidents like this could get out of hand.
When Sierra Leone started to disintegrate, Paul and Tess fled to Gabon where, ten years later, I met him again. He'd expanded his research on the origins of AIDS to include the bush meat trade. More and more evidence suggested AIDS had leaped from animals to humans through animals killed for food. I'd come to Gabon to look into this.
Paul drove as we looked for roadside merchants selling bush meat. Unlike Sierra Leone, Gabon is a pretty safe place, and I wasn't expecting any bloodshed. Then we ran into the accident. A small white truck was upside down in the middle of the road, the cab smashed in. Two policemen pointed guns at our car, waving us to a stop. At first, I thought they were directing traffic, but as we approached, one man bent down towards my window. A large piece of his scalp was hanging down over his right eye. I saw that both policemen were covered in blood. They had been in the truck and wanted a ride to the hospital. I realized this was a dangerous situation, not only because of the guns being waved by disoriented men, but also because of the blood. There was a good chance either man could have been carrying the AIDS virus. With money, power, and opportunities for sexual favors, police and soldiers are often viral vectors for AIDS in developing countries. What if these men were infected? Blood was flying everywhere as they waved their hands at Paul and me.
Paul knew we'd be transporting them and told me to climb into the back seat while he checked out the situation. After speaking briefly with the men, he reached for his medical bag. All I could think to say to him was, "Paul, wear your gloves!" He had latex gloves for handling animals. But he knew wearing gloves might not be a politically good idea in this situation. Both policemen seemed dazed from the accident, but we both wondered if they'd been drinking too. Paul quickly checked himself and said, "I think I'm okay--I don't have any sores on my hands."
After Paul patched up both men, they got into the front of the car. Their blood smeared on the seat, door, dash, and window--everything I'd likely come in contact with later. A crowd gathered to watch the odd spectacle of two white people in a vehicle with two very bloody policemen. We dropped one officer at the local hospital. Paul went in with the men, returning with the senior officer in tow. Paul was quite upset. The policeman had attempted to unload his gun by firing it into the floor of the crowded waiting room. Paul had to physically restrain him. "Someone could have been killed," he said.
The senior officer insisted we take him to police headquarters. He had arrived in town that morning to attend a meeting and, we later realized, to visit his girlfriend. At police headquarters, he jumped out of the car and walked aimlessly away, clearly suffering from a concussion. While Paul followed him, I tried to clean up the blood soaked car, using antibiotic wipes the National Geographic medical staff gave me. I wiped down every possible surface the men might have touched with their bloody hands. I finished with a large pile of bloody wipes that I carefully placed in a plastic sack.
