Mauritius | Preview #5 for hands holding the line...
Joseph’s hand grips the wheelchair. At first I’m unsure what I am photographing, let alone hearing, as words unfurl in Mauritian Creole. His skin contrasts with polished rings as his presence blends brilliant charm with the wear of six decades of experience. Staff tease him with the nickname of a ladies' man past, but he explains how age now leaves him with a weakened heart, less room for flirtation.
He speaks like a preacher, electrified, adjusting messages of HIV prevention and treatment to his listener. But the elderly client before him, confined to the chair, looks beyond him, eyes glossed-over unmoved. Afterward, Joseph hoists him into a van to return home. The encounter was built on years of solidarity: local organizations saving lives one conversation and home-pick-up at a time.
Mauritius once cast HIV as an epidemic bound to the margins: people who injected drugs, punished and whispered about. But the virus has moved, now rising among young women and the general population, those who rarely picture themselves at risk. And yet the legacy of that early framing lingers like rust in the joints. Stigma clings to drug use and life with HIV, while lethargy is felt in the places where new conversations are most needed.
The country struggles with epidemic control, each step slowed by delays between HIV screening, diagnosis, and linkages to ART. Retention, too, falters as fear and denial wedge into the gaps after clients initiate treatment. Young people now grow up barely hearing the words from people like Joseph, even as their parents remain familiar with the early pathbreaking work of these local organizations.
And so these communities left holding the line in Mauritius' response to HIV stretch themselves across two fronts: tending to an aging cohort of people living with HIV, many scarred by addiction, while trying to redefine their relevance to the wider public. The dual task is exhausting, but necessary.
The photo shows only a hand gripping a wheelchair, yet perhaps it points to something larger: a response caught between its past and its future. What once defined it now confines it. What could move it forward waits, hesitant, in slow motion.
About this article
- Learn more about the work of local organizations mentioned in this article.
- Part of the hands series: Previews of the people and themes at the center of the response to HIV.
Member discussion