Someday this will be all over: Growing up with HIV in urban eastern Zimbabwe

The study explores the lives of children growing HIV positive in the eastern Zimbabwean town of Mutare at a time of severe crisis in the state, marked by impoverishment, organized violence and mass death. The country stands at the epicenter of the global HIV epidemic. The site of the study and the methods employed are described. The methods are varied but all within the usual modes of ethnography. The ethnography grew out of a psychotherapeutic engagement with a group of children living with HIV. As a result both western psychology and psychotherapy are brought into question. Psychotherapy and ethnography are jointly employed to produce an account of children's lives (and deaths) that is sensitive to emotions and their social contexts. The study examines children's experiences through the institutional domains of family and kin, clinics and other forms of healing, churches and religious practices, and experiences of dying and bereavement. Families are severely depleted by death and migration. Against patrilineal norms, much daily caring seems to occur in mother's families. Clinics continue to offer partial western medical care despite daunting resource constraints. Western medicine sits on older templates of 'traditional' and 'spiritual' healing. Anti retrovirals and other basic medicines are available but may exacerbate domestic discord and fail to meet more obvious physical symptoms. HIV infection is lived in secrecy despite obvious physical manifestations. Children and their families appear to prefer spiritual alternatives to medical care, perhaps partly as a result of the severe limitations placed on the latter. A wide variety of religious practices, primarily Christian in a plethora of forms, flourish in the context. Dying may come to be seen by children as preferable to continued struggle against severe adversity. Child deaths are seen to be deeply imbued with religious practice and given voice through religious idioms. The study seeks to describe the specificity of the Zimbabwean context as it affects the lives of HIV positive children.