What AIDS Education Taught Me About “Plandemic”

This past week, the viral video “Plandemic” has been making me think of another epidemic, and other conspiracy theories, I once experienced. Sixteen years ago, I was in Peace Corps in a village being decimated by AIDS, and that village was also beset by misinformation. It sounded much like the theories being spread today.

I lived in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, a high plateau of rolling hills and mud brick houses where the lush, rainy climate, cool temperatures, and steep hillsides were suitable for growing tea. My village was home to a tea factory that served the whole surrounding area. My house was part of the primary school complex, which was perched atop a hill covered with orderly, bright green tea bushes. Across this picturesque “chai bowl” stood the factory, the only building with electricity for many miles around.

In picking season, the bucolic silence was broken by the intermittent whine of the factory machines. Tea trucks would lumber along the red clay roads, stopping to buy tea from villagers who stood holding the freshly picked leaves in burlap sacks.

The factory brought important income to the village. Most people were subsistence farmers, and with tea money, they could buy essentials like soap and clothing.

But the factory also brought AIDS.

Of the sixty-odd other Peace Corps Volunteers in my cohort, I never talked to one who lived in a harder-hit area of the country. My village was one of the most remote, but the tea trucks connected it to the cities. The trucks carried not only tea, but also workers—young, single men who often had relationships with various women in different towns.

AIDS was already rampant in the village when I arrived in 2002. My village had two thousand people, and there was around one funeral a week when I first arrived. It worsened precipitously in my two years there. By the time I left in 2004, there were three funerals a week.

The suffering of local people felt unimaginable at times. Every family seemed to have lost at least one immediate member. Orphans were common, taken in by grandparents or other families, recognizable by their ragged clothes and their serious, haunted expressions. The dying were cared for by family members in their homes.

I started out in Peace Corps as an environmental educator but wound up an AIDS educator. That was what the village needed most, and what they most wanted me to help with. Each month, two local women and I would walk to each of the five village centers and teach about how AIDS is spread, how it kills, how to prevent it, and how to protect oneself while caring for the sick—for instance by using plastic bags as gloves.

The two women I taught with, two of my closest friends in the village, have both died since I left. I believe at least one died of AIDS. She likely already had HIV, and already knew about it, at the time I worked with her.

Learning of these deaths was heartbreaking for me. I want to return to Tanzania one day, and the biggest thing pulling me back is my desire to pay respects at the graves of these two great women.

Education was spotty in my village. I met brilliant people: the women I worked with, a local doctor, a talented botanist, and a progressive farmer whose practices could have been on the cover of a soil conservation journal.

Meanwhile, the Catholic minister learned from me that the United States is not in Europe. That was a common misperception. I drew him a world map in my notebook at a meeting; he raised his eyebrows in surprise and delight.

It was common for people to be terrible at basic arithmetic. On the other hand, most primary school students were more informed about climate change than many American political leaders.

AIDS knowledge varied wildly, too. Conspiracy theories were rampant. A common theory ran that “Marekani”—America—had caused AIDS in Africa. We Americans wanted to hurt Africans; we had brought AIDS in on our condoms; using condoms could infect you with AIDS.

Shocked and outraged to hear this theory, which was being spread primarily by churches, I worked with my co-educators to debunk it. We patiently explained the realities of how AIDS is spread. It seemed that many people were listening. This was critical work.

I’m still in touch with one close friend from my village. The tables have turned: she’s worried about me now. “Korona” hasn’t reached our old village, she tells me in Swahili on Facebook Messenger from the nearby town where she now lives. But she’s heard the new pandemic is bad here in Marekani. Am I okay?

Yes, I reply, limited by my now-rusty Swahili skills. So far, my family is okay, thank God.

I haven’t seen “Plandemic” and don’t intend to. But from what I hear, it has things in common with the conspiracy theories I heard in Tanzania about AIDS.

Its claim about face masks is notably similar to the AIDS-on-condoms theory. There is a giant conspiracy afoot to infect everyone with COVID-19, the video asserts. The virus is actually spread by face masks. Don’t use masks; it’s a trap; you’ll get the virus!

Hearing this theory, so many years after hearing the condom theory in Africa, is bizarrely comforting to me. It’s appalling, too—I’m just as outraged now as then. But the similarity tells me this is as much about human nature as it is about education and ignorance.

I think I understand, now. People want to know why disaster has befallen us. We want a sense of control. There’s comfort in believing a pandemic was caused intentionally, by masterminds behind the curtain, because there’s comfort in believing it’s possible to have that kind of control.

The reality is scarier: that there is no mastermind. That the existence of this pandemic is random, or at least not orchestrated by anyone. That we truly are at nature’s cruel mercy. That people we love, or we ourselves, might fall sick and die for reasons that have little to do with morality, and that the only tools at our disposal—medical science, education, sound leadership, and prayer—offer only imperfect protection.

People cling to conspiracy theories because we want to believe there is an order to the universe. Reality is messy and disorganized. That is sometimes unbearable for us.

It was devastating, at times, to live amidst the AIDS epidemic. Peace Corps brought in a grief counselor to work with traumatized volunteers, and that helped. Villagers, of course, didn’t have resources for professional counselors. By the end of my service, though, I did find one note of hope amidst the suffering.

It came when another volunteer invited me to her village to help her set up her own AIDS education group. Her village wasn’t in tea country and hadn’t been hit hard by AIDS yet; she was being proactive. She and I sat outside with maybe twenty adults on a bright, sunny day, fielding their initial questions about the disease. To my surprise, they had questions I’d never heard in my village.

“Why should we care for people with AIDS?” one woman asked. “Those people have sinned. They are being punished by God. Shouldn’t we let them be punished?”

Taken aback, I talked about compassion, as well as the importance of caring for the sick to help prevent further spread. A man spoke up and pointed out that “we are all sinners.” There was a murmuring as people went back and forth about the woman’s question. I felt that ultimately, she was persuaded: no matter how someone got AIDS, they deserved compassion.

That group seemed less comfortable talking about AIDS than people in my village. This was new for them, still more of a taboo. I came away feeling that my village was “ahead” of theirs. The disease had taken such a toll where I lived that no one could deny its ubiquity and power.  AIDS sufferers were no longer “other;” they were family members.

My village had already learned compassion and acknowledged the problem. People there had become desperate to learn the truth.

But those lessons were learned in the worst possible way.

I hope we never have to get to that point with COVID-19. I hope we can find compassion for each other now, before this pandemic takes more of a toll than it needs to. It’s appalling that the compassion and leadership we need isn’t coming from our president, but it can still come from the rest of us.

Compassion means not only caring for the sick and vulnerable by wearing face masks, but also patiently attending to the anger and pain of those who believe the conspiracy theories. The more they are mocked and dismissed, the less open they’ll be to ideas that challenge their assumptions. The best way to make change is through kind, patient conversations, one person at a time, over time.

Here is an article on how to have such conversations about “Plandemic” and why it’s important to have them.

And here is an article to share with those who believe what the video is saying.

I got both of these articles from the excellent blog Update from an Epidemic by Betsy Brown, a Seattle doctor whose daily dispatches offer insight about the pandemic. I’ll sign off the same way Betsy always does.

Wash your hands and cover your nose.