Global Inequalities and Health

1218 Words5 Pages
Global Inequalities and Health In Chapter 16, of Parker Farmer’s reader, he describes the story of a woman named Acephie who lost her life to AIDS in 1991. Acephie was born into a family who lived in poverty and lost their home and land when the valley they lived in was flooded by a hydroelectric dam. To lessen her chances of staying in poverty, she worked to help her mother carry produce to a local market on Friday mornings for profit. The route they had to take to get to the market took them right through Peligre, which was the site of the dam and a military barracks. Acephie, being a beautiful young woman, caught the eye of a soldier named Honorat. Though Acephie knew that Honorat was a married man with kids, she went along with his pursuing her. It was also known that Honorat was rarely with the same girl at one time. She wondered why the elders told her not to go with him, but she felt that this would be her chance to get out of poverty. Acephie and Honorat were sexual partners for less than a month and Honorat soon became ill with unexplained fevers and went back to his wife in the town of Peligre. As it is stated in, Rx For Survival: Why We Must Rise to the Global Health Challenge, “They discovered that it (AIDS) enters the body and then goes silent for many years while the infected human body unwittingly passes it on to others. It later breaks out, not in the form of its own recognizable disease, but with an attack on the whole defense system” (Hilts, 5). Acephie soon got over Honorat and left her village to go to Mirebalais to go to “cooking school,” which was actually a place where young women went to turn into servants in the city. At age 22, Acephie traveled to Port-au-Prince and got a job as a housekeeper for a middle-class Haitian woman who worked for the U.S. embassy. While working as a housekeeper she met a man, got pregnant, and had
Open Document