April 24, 2014
KASENSERO, Uganda (AFP) - When you risk your life fishing on dangerous seas, a drink in the bars back on shore seem a welcome relief, but in Uganda, it has created a culture with staggering rates of HIV.
Exhausted from a night of hard fishing on the vast inland sea of Uganda's Lake Victoria, fishermen come off the boats as the first rays of light glimmer at dawn.
Once the fish is sold and the nets untangled, some go home to their families, but most head straight for the bars of the town and the sex workers who hang out there, despite HIV rates soaring to at least six times the national average.
Here, 43 percent of the population live with HIV compared to seven percent nationally: for a man seeking a sex worker, the rates and risks are likely to be far higher.
"The fishing communities along the lakeshore are the places with the highest HIV prevalence rates in the country," said Raymond Byaruhanga, chief doctor at the AIDS Information Centre in the Ugandan capital Kampala.
"The mindset of the fishermen is to say, 'one day my boat will overturn and I will die. Therefore there's no need to be scared of HIV, it will take several years to kill me'."
Kasensero, a sleepy fishing port of some 10,000 people close to the Tanzanian border, has the dubious distinction of being the place where the first case of AIDS in Uganda was reported in the 1980s.
"Most of the fishermen are interested only in drinking and in women," explained Josua Mununuzi, the owner of four boats.
