Fuel Against AIDS Ignorance

by Jordan Yerman | April 28, 2007 at 08:25 am

451 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

It's amazing how, in such a media-savvy country like South Africa, so relatively few are educated about the risks and treatment of HIV. Partly this has to do with the massive disparity between rich and poor (and the attendant access to information), and partly to do with the opacity of the most high-profile AIDS-awareness campaign, LoveLife. It also does not help that high-profile government officials, including the Health Minister and President, have publicly demonstrated ignorance on the subject. Meanwhile, the guy in this article actually has a pretty good idea. He's doing something normal, but doing it for an unusually long time.

For six weeks, Andre van Zijl has been pumping petrol around the clock at a petrol station in the picturesque seaside town of Knysna on South Africa's south coast.

Why? To raise awareness about HIV/Aids. The 57-year-old Aids campaigner aims to log 1 000 working hours this week in his latest publicity stunt to highlight the devastating scale of the Aids epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, home to 70% of people living with HIV in the world.

"It takes doing something this unusual to draw attention to a problem that many people are tired of hearing. It has nothing to do with me or what I can accomplish as an individual. It is about doing it in a noticeable way so people think twice," he says.

Van Zijl is no stranger to such public acts, having staged marathon sessions ranging from swimming in the Indian Ocean with dolphins for five days to disco dancing 354 consecutive hours. He also roller-skated about 2 400km from Cape Town to Pretoria and back.