Learning to Hope: Children, HIV, and
Education in Botswana & Lesotho

by Lesley Louden

While working on a documentary video for the African Library Project with filmmaker Anne Evans, I met many extraordinary children and teachers who are struggling with the HIV epidemic by focusing on literacy. Botswana and Lesotho, the two countries I visited, have the second and third highest HIV prevalence rates of infection in the world. I decided to document their stories, to try to show in images this intersection of literacy and the HIV epidemic that happens in the classrooms and libraries of the primary schools. The epidemic has devastated families and affected all citizens of both countries, but education provides hope, a way to begin recovering, especially for the young who have suffered such great losses.

Leshonono, an 18-year-old shepherd, is in the seventh grade at Malealea Primary School in mountainous Lesotho. Over half of the population lives on less than $1 a day, so school fees are often prohibitive. Leshonono lives with his grandparents and tends their small flock of sheep. He worries about what will happen to his grandparents if he passes his seventh grade test and has to move to town to attend high school. Fluent in his second language, English, and conversant with all aspects of the HIV epidemic, he wants to become a teacher in Malealea Valley. “I have to tell the little boys how to be good, and I have to teach them how to learn everything that I learned at school.”

The photographs in this exhibition illustrate the struggle occurring in primary schools to overcome the devastating effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Lesotho. We interviewed six-year-old students who can explain HIV transmission vectors, and we saw writing samples and crayon drawing on the walls that deal with death due to AIDS. I have heard from journalists that sub-Saharan Africa is doomed due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But “Learning to Hope” reveals another truth through images of these resilient children, the future leaders of their country.

Lesley Louden On behalf of The African Library Project (ALP)