|
|
 | |
 |  |
| WE ARE ALL THE SAME | |
 December 1, 2004  | |
|
ABC News correspondent Jim Wooten shares the message of a 12-year-old South African boy who died of AIDS, only after receiving worldwide attention for speaking on behalf of AIDS victims.
|
|
JEFFREY BROWN: Nkosi Johnson was born with AIDS in 1989 in rural South Africa. The disease was transmitted through his mother, who died when Nkosi was two. The boy was taken to a Johannesburg shelter for children and mothers with AIDS, founded by a white South African woman named Gail Johnson.
NKOSI JOHNSON: We are normal. We are human beings. We can walk. We can talk. (Cheers and Applause) We have needs, just like everyone else; we are all the same. Thank you. (Applause) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Giving AIDS a human face | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
JEFFREY BROWN: He would die within a year, aged 12 and weighing just 20 pounds. His story is told in the new book, "We Are All the Same," written by veteran journalist Jim Wooten, the senior correspondent for ABC News Nightline. Jim Wooten joins me now. Welcome. JIM WOOTEN: Thanks for inviting me.
JIM WOOTEN: That's what he tried to do and that's what I tried to do in this book as well because the numbers, 40 million people now infected worldwide, nearly 40 million, they don't mean anything; 40 million sounds like 30 million or 42 million. It doesn't really mean anything. But when you can put a face on the disease, as I've tried to do in this book, then it takes on some meaning. Dr. Piot and the other people in the international AIDS community are working very hard, but what has happened so far is like spitting in the ocean. It doesn't really make much difference because the problem is so vast. And without political will, without billions of more dollars it's just not going to change. JEFFREY BROWN: Well, tell us a little bit about Nkosi Johnson. In some ways it strikes me as a typical story mother to child transmission, orphaned at a very young age. But in other ways it is a very atypical story.
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Nkosi's courage | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
JIM WOOTEN: It was absolutely an odd experience and yet the child was irresistible for me. To this day I can't really explain it. I mean it had something more to do than the fact that he was cute or that he was tiny. That's one of the awful effects of pediatric AIDS is that it stunts the children. They don't grow. And so when I first saw Nkosi, he was 11 years old. And I thought he was probably six or seven. I wasn't really sure it was the child that I had come to see because he was so tiny. But his attraction to me was also in his courage. I had over the years covered a lot of combat and a lot of wars. I had seen men do heroic things under fire. But Nkosi showed to me and taught me a different kind of courage, and that's the quiet courage to do what has to be done in the face of these absolutely overwhelming odds that he well understood. And he had a mantra that has stuck with me over the years since his death which was this: Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are. JEFFREY BROWN: Quite remarkable that an 11-year-old, 12-year-old boy... we have a short clip from a story you did for Nightline near the end of his life with I think excerpts from what I think must be some of the last interviews you did with him. Let's look at that now.
NKOSI JOHNSON: We're full. This is a small house. It can't fit the other mothers who are HIV. They are dying. JIM WOOTEN: And as usual, there was his thin voice of defiance. NIKOSI JOHNSON: But I said no, I'm not going to give up. I've got a lot of work to do for the others, the mothers and children out there. |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The public fight | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
JIM WOOTEN: It was because Nkosi had become something of a celebrity in South Africa and eventually in the international AIDS community because he and his foster mother Gail Johnson, who is a tornado, wanted... he wanted to go to school and she was just determined that he was going to go to school.
JEFFREY BROWN: There is tremendous resistance to that. JIM WOOTEN: Absolutely, Mbeki was saying, no, they can't come in; they're poisoned; this is all a plot by the west to kill black South Africans, which is bizarre. Besides that, he didn't stay to hear Nkosi's speech. He had left just before the child spoke. Nkosi later told me, very uncharacteristically, in that funny little sing-song voice of his, "You know, that really made me angry." | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Nkosi Foundation | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
JEFFREY BROWN: We should say that most of the proceeds of your book are going to what is called The Nkosi Foundation. Briefly, tell us what they're doing now.
JEFFREY BROWN: Quite a legacy. Jim Wooten, thanks a lot. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
        |
|
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | ||
| ||
| PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved. | ||
| ||
She
later took Nkosi into her own home, caring for him for years as her own son. Together,
they crusaded for better care and treatment for the victims of AIDS. In July 2000,
Nkosi, then 11, received worldwide attention when he addressed the International
Conference on AIDS held that year in Durban, South Africa. 
JEFFREY
BROWN: You and I were just watching the interview with Peter Piot and like many
people in the audience shaking our head at the enormity of the problem. But Nkosi
Johnson put a human face on it, didn't he? 
JIM
WOOTEN: It is atypical because having been dealt a very bad hand, having been
born infected into a culture of abject poverty, into a family of no education
and almost no future, he then finds himself in a middle class white home in Johannesburg
where he lived for the rest of his life and was able to get sanitary conditions,
a reasonably healthy diet, medical care, medication, and I think that contributed
to the fact that he survived as long as he did, perhaps longer than any other
pediatric AIDS patient ever. Atypically, I think also applies to the kind of child
he was. He was compelling for me because I stepped across this distance that I
always keep between myself and the people that I cover. 
JEFFREY
BROWN: This was quite new for you, right? 
JIM
WOOTEN: By Christmas, he had lost a great deal of weight from his already undersized
body. His fondest holiday wish was not for himself but for a larger Nkosi's Haven
with room enough for 100 mothers and their children. 
JEFFREY
BROWN: A lot of work to do for an 11-year-old boy. You know, the work they did,
there was a very public fight they had. So the clip we saw earlier when he made
the speech, that was fraught with a lot of political meaning, wasn't it? 
And
through this long drawn out fight, there is now something on the books in South
Africa called Nkosi's Law which says that no child can be kept from going to school
because of HIV but over the months of his prominence, he also began to take on
the political leaders, including President Mbeki, which is what he did that night
in the clip that you saw from the AIDS convention; in which he simply says I wish
the government and President Mbeki would allow anti-retro viral drugs, AZT and
Neveripine into the country. 
JIM
WOOTEN: The Nkosi Foundation is very simple and straightforward. It provides care
and housing and comfort to women with AIDS and to their children and to AIDS orphans.
It is a small operation and very... as I said, it's almost like spitting in the
ocean when you look at all the numbers. There are 700,000 AIDS orphans in South
Africa now. Nkosi's Foundation perhaps cares for 30 or 40. But do all you can
with what you have in the time you have in the place you are.