Article: Photojournalist Tries "to Be the Voice for Africans with HIV/AIDS"

30 July 2001

Article: Photojournalist Tries "to Be the Voice for Africans with HIV/AIDS"

Andrew Petkun reports on recent trip to Zambia, Kenya, Eritrea

By Susan Ellis
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- Andrew Petkun is an American photojournalist who wants to do nothing more with his life than devote it to telling the story of Africans living with HIV/AIDS.

Through photographs taken on his trips around the continent, Petkun captures the spirit of one African elder who told him, with great dignity: "We are not simply HIV-positive. We are positively living with HIV." The journalist discussed his work July 5 in a telephone interview with the Washington File.

On his most recent working visit in June to Zambia, Kenya, and Eritrea, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Petkun addressed high school students, young doctors, AIDS activists of all ages, and journalists, who, he said, have the responsibility of carrying the story of the disease -- how to prevent it or live with it as comfortably as possible -- to powerful government officials through their articles.

In Kenya, he said, he was assigned "four young photojournalists from the leading newspapers to go out with me on a traveling workshop. They went on the assignment basically because they were told to and it brought them out of Nairobi and was a different kind of thing, but they really had no great expectation that it was going to be an enjoyable or meaningful trip."

In the daylong workshop, he said, "they had the opportunity to see how I worked and how I approached people. The stigma [of AIDS] is such that it's very difficult in any of these countries for the locals to be able to make any progress [in talking to afflicted people]. In the case of these young photojournalists, they're given any assignments their editor metes out to them. So AIDS is something they cover, but in very superficial terms. They hadn't got into it in depth to the extent that they needed to really confront the issue and publicize it properly so that the general populace will be able to think about changing behavioral patterns."

Petkun and the student-journalists were driven to a remote village in a four-wheel-drive vehicle by an American Embassy Foreign Service National employee, Kizungu Kitana. There the students had their first chance to see the Petkun approach: Engaging an elderly man in conversation, the seasoned photojournalist asked what the man needed most. The villager, who "inherited AIDS when [he] inherited [his] brother's wife" after his death, a common custom there, was chairman of his village HIV/AIDS support organization. "We counsel our people, we give them what help we can," he said, adding that the territory he had to travel "covers a wide geographical area, and we need transportation. If only we had a bicycle so we could get around.

"You have come from the land of Mr. Bush," the elder continued. "We have people come and visit us and sometimes they take our pictures and they talk about their concern for our circumstances, and nothing ever happens. We need some help in trying to feed our AIDS group. All we want is to live out the remaining days that we have with some comfort."

Petkun told him: "I don't represent the U.N. I'm not someone with lots of money to spend." Then he took $100 out of his pocket and "handed it to him and asked the others to take a picture and to take it back to their newspapers and ask them to print it with their stories." He then took the $100 back and handed it to Kitana, asking him to buy food for the man and his community. Kitana later told him, "That $100 will buy a month's worth of food for them."

Petkun assured the villager that he would show his photographs and tell his story "every time I lecture, and I hope it will bring some focus on you, but at least let me acknowledge what you are telling me; I hear you and my heart and my soul are with you."

"You are a big man, but you don't talk like a big man. You talk like one of us," the man responded.

The young journalists "came away from this experience, to a man, saying: 'We really appreciate having had this opportunity. It was a very interesting experience for us. We never had an opportunity to get out into the villages before.' And so these guys were delighted to see an opportunity to learn how they could approach the folks that they wanted to photograph; and the position they could take in terms of generating interest from their editors about covering this pandemic."

Petkun praised the work of Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni in opening up to the public the HIV/AIDS problem. "The [government officials] in these [many African] countries are so frozen in fear because of the stigma and the lack of resources to devote to the disease," he said. "It takes an enormous amount of courage for anybody in a leadership position to say, 'We have a problem and we as a nation can help solve this,' which is what Museveni and some others in Senegal have done."

Petkun says one focus of his work is to "try to get [African] government officials at whatever level to acknowledge the fact that they have a serious problem and that the very best allocation of their resources is not in buying more Mercedes [cars]. It is using the resources they have available to help their own people who are suffering terribly. I'm trying to say, 'If you want to stay in power, the very best way ... is to do for your own people, and they will elect you for life by acclamation.'"

He hopes to have the opportunity to travel to French-speaking Africa and promises to take an immersion course to improve his French if he gets the assignment. In the meantime, his work from trips to Tanzania with the WAMATA AIDS Support Group; to the Mother Teresa Center and Orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; to Nkosi's Haven for HIV-positive women and children in Johannesburg, South Africa; and to the Coping Center for People Living with AIDS at the Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone, Botswana, may be seen on the Internet at: http://www.worldbank.org\html\extdr\aidsphoto.