Patricia Machawira

How is Education Possible in a World with Aids?: Telling the Stories of Teachers with Aids Patricia Machawira

The thesis focuses on how three Zimbabwean teachers living with AIDS experience their illness and how this impacts on the implementation of HIV and AIDS policy in the classrooms. The teacher stories tell a tale of school systems which are struggling with a moral discourse of AIDS, sin and immorality. They demonstrate how all three teachers repeatedly confront the belief of others that AIDS is a result of immoral behavior and how others hold them personally responsible for their condition. The teacher stories reveal school systems that have yet to come to grips with the HIV virus and its impact on both staff and pupils; systems which are characterized by silence, denial and stigma. They challenge the notion of schools as HIV free by showing how the virus travels in and out of the school gates everyday in the bodies of students and teachers; how the disease of the physical body affects the personal standing of the ill person and how the person, rather than the disease carries the blame.