Download the PDF Has the race to save Africa from aids put Western science at odds with Western ethics?
by Michael Specter
At forty-one, Hala has five children and eight grandchildren. Her first husband left when their second child was born. Her second husband died of aids nearly twenty years ago, in the earliest days of the epidemic. Hala often tells people that she sells charcoal, doughnuts, or cooking oil on the streets, but that isn't true. She is a prostitute, who has spent nearly half her life working out of a wattle hut in Pumwani, one of Nairobi's most crowded–and violent–slums. On an average day, she might see ten men, most of them truck drivers from Tanzania. Read more »
Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998.
