Highway of Hope

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David Browne reflects on his two months on the road in East Africa filming a documentary for the ITF

It was – physically and emotionally – the end of the line, crouching inside this crumbling mud house trying to set up the video camera for a final interview with a mother and child who were both dying of AIDS. Outside, across the railway tracks, heavy-duty trucks rumbled and roared up and down the hill that obscured Kenya’s great port of Mombasa. Within these destitute, but private, walls Caroline Akoch and her four-year-old daughter Ediza cradled each other in an embrace, as Caroline struggled for breath and Ediza’s eyes shone through the filtered light.

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I have been a human rights journalist and film maker for some time now, and in the course of my work around the world have perhaps seen more than my fair share of death and destruction. Throughout, I have always been determined to portray my central protagonists – often the poorest and least empowered people in the developing world – as survivors and not victims; as remarkable human beings who triumph over great adversity.

HARDSHIP AND HELP FOR EAST AFRICAN WORKERS

Three million people die of AIDS worldwide per year

90 per cent of these deaths are in poor countries

In nine sub-Saharan African countries life expectancy has dropped to under 40 years

Uganda, which experienced 40 per cent prevalence in the early nineties, has reduced its infection rate to six per cent through government-supported
education and care programmes. However, Ugandan truck drivers show
a higher infection rate than the national average

8,000 drivers work on East Africa’s Northern Corridor, with monthly earnings on average equivalent to US$150

7,000 sex workers ply the route, charging around US$2 per customer

There are 300 established sex workers at the Malaba border crossing post between Kenya and Uganda

The Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union is supporting four peer counselling community associations at Malaba

Malaba has recently become Africa’s first one-stop border post. The hope is that this will reduce waiting times to three hours

Transport workers contribute 30 per cent of wealth in Uganda and 12 per cent in Kenya

The Kenyan Railway Workers’ Union is very active in employer-supported peer counseling work in Kenyan Railways

Kenyan drivers have been denied legal trade union recognition for 10 years

We had waited and prepared for this moment since the start of our demanding two-month shoot for the ITF, making a documentary film about the impact of HIV/AIDS along East Africa’s key Northern transport Corridor.

Along the way, as we traversed the wondrous, often daunting, landscapes of Kenya and Uganda in trucks, on trains, in buses, vans, taxis, on foot, even on the back of “boda-boda” hire bicycles, many a potential ending or emotional denouement had presented itself.

But we needed something special to cap all our hard work; to commemorate the integrity and tremendous efforts being made by ITF affiliates in the fight against the killer HIV/AIDS virus.

Lying in her bed Caroline Akoch told us, without rancour or hatred: “My husband was a long distance truck driver. Sometimes he was away from the family for two weeks at a time. I didn’t know how he was behaving. We only realised he was sick at the final stages of the disease. We tried our best to get him treatment. But it was too late.

“I want to tell everybody that life is precious. In life there are no spare parts. If you mess up you always pay the price at the end. Truck drivers must take care. And they must remember that they have families to take care of.”

Challenges of AIDS reporting

As many of us know, much of the developing world – and sub-Saharan Africa in particular – is threatened with the devastating spectre of HIV/AIDS.

Grim statistics and apocalyptic headlines, beginning with the infamous “Gay Plague” scare stories from the early days of AIDS reporting, have become journalistic stock-in-trade clichés.

I first reported on the AIDS pandemic in 1984, and I did further reports on the disease in India in the mid-1990s and then Botswana in 2004. Always, because of the constraints of my profession, it’s been difficult, beyond the obvious suffering, to put a human and truthful face on the story and to try and explain to a wide audience what is really going on behind the façade of sensation.

The video and documentary project with the ITF could not have come at a more fortuitous time, perhaps for both of us. I wanted to revisit the AIDS story in a fresh and compelling way and the ITF needed a film to highlight its commitment to HIV/AIDS awareness and education among millions of transport workers, not just in Africa but around the world.

Romano Ojiambo-Ochieng, general secretary of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union of Uganda, who is based in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, leads a programme helping people to help themselves – that most difficult and elusive goal of profound and lasting development.

The response from transport workers to our requests for help – be they truck drivers, railway workers or port workers – was overwhelming. Through good timing and a little help from contacts, we were even allowed to film at Malaba on the Kenya-Uganda border and inside the port of Mombasa, strategic areas normally off limits to camera crews.

The keys to our success, I believe, were sensitivity, teamwork and a shared belief in the story. Assisted by the ITF we gained the confidence of transport workers, female sex workers and fellow human rights activists.

And throughout our story ran the battered romance of the road, the 1,200 kilometres of the Northern Corridor’s main trunk that bumps and grinds, and all too occasionally flows, from Kampala to Kenya’s fascinating Indian Ocean city of Mombasa, East Africa’s gateway to the world.

African transport workers, so vital to the economic growth and development of the continent, are often unfairly demonised as alcohol and drug fuelled sex fiends.

Yes, it is true that a significant minority are sexually hyper-active and put themselves at risk through reckless, unprotected, sex. But what we saw on the road, despite all the very real hardships, should give us all cause for quiet optimism. The safe sex message is getting through. Condoms are, increasingly, being used. Awareness is widespread. Sexual behaviour is being modified. The real harbingers of HIV/AIDS are poverty, ignorance and the moral bankruptcy of economic globalisation.

David Browne is managing editor of the film company Parachute Pictures, which specialises in human rights and development issues. His documentary for the ITF, the Highway of Hope, is available in DVD format on request from education@itf.org.uk

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