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Looking for Josie

By David Kattenburg

Bumbire Island sits on the northern tip of a sliver of an archipelago in southwest Lake Victoria, in Tanzania, East Africa.

I visited Bumbire in December 2009, hosted by a pair of American missionaries named Dale and Christine Hamilton. Dale and Chris work with an NGO called Africa Inland Mission. With the support of the Canadian International Development Agency, Christine and Dale have set up clinics on Bumbire and neighboring islands specializing in maternal-child health and AIDS awareness-raising. Listen here:

In our last story, Dale took me to a fishing camp on nearby Kinagi Island, where HIV-AIDS prevalence rates are sky high. In this final chapter in our series, Christine Hamilton and I head off to a fishing settlement called Lushonga, in search of a woman named Josie, who suffers from an advanced case of AIDS. Our conversation starts on the topic of Chris’ epidemiological work … her gathering of statistics on the prevalence of HIV-AIDS in these islands.