The Baptist Church in Arcadia had set up its own pre-school for the children in the area. As a way of providing affordable pre-school education in an area of Harare that is extremely poor. My fixer and driver was Pastor Chipato the Pastor of the church. Two of his congregation, Molly Green and Sharon Lawrence, had volunteered to teach and look after the children.

The Church also provided a daily meal for up to 40 other children in the community, helping families who could barley afford to feed and cloth themselves.

I had invited me to the church service on the Sunday. The previous Friday we had been at the Arcadia Clinic, next door to the Church. Earlier that week the Pastor had told me how Sharon had been very ill and that she had confided in him that she was HIV positive. In the clinic I met Sharon for the first and only time. She was sitting in a small room at the back of the clinic being attended to by several nurses, to ill to speak, and looking very frightened and distressed.

A few hours after we had seen Sharon in the clinic she was dead. She had been taken to Harare's main hospital where, in the waiting room, she passed away before she could be admitted and treated.

After the service on the Sunday Sharon's funeral took place. This is a community in which many young people are HIV positive and many have died and continue to do so. Sharon was already a widow her husband having passed away some years previously leaving sharon with 5 children to raise alone. Now it was down to Sharon's elderly mother, herself a widow, to raise the children and provide for them.

This is not an affluent community and Sharon's mother is not a wealthy lady. With no help provided by the state it would be up to the extended family, the Church and the local community to help provide for the family.

Sharon's illness was not widely know her mother and the pastor were the only ones who knew explicitly the reason for her illness and death. There is still a huge amount of stigma attached to HIV/AIDs in Zimbabwe even though it is estimated that upwards of 3 million people are infected. This stigma contributes to the death of many suffers as they are unwilling to admit their status and thus receive the required ARV's which help to keep them alive.