“My life has no hope. Why doesn’t the Lord just take me? I will feel better if I am dead.” Vusi Ngema speaks these words quietly. Then he bends over, clasps his head in his hands and stares for long minutes at the floor of his small, neat shack.

“My main worry is that I am a burden to my family,” he continues, his eyes still downcast. “Most of the time I feel so stressed. I don’t talk to anyone. I just want to be left alone. I have headaches and a stiff neck and stiff shoulders. It is as if I am carrying something very heavy.”

His voice drops even lower: “One time I decided to just kill myself. I tried to commit suicide. I took a small bottle of Benzine and drank it. I nearly died. I had such stomach pains.”

At 44, Vusi thought he would be able to support his family. Instead, all he sees before him is the accumulation of more and more pain as the HIV virus in his body eats away at his immune system and renders him dependent and helpless. “When he sees my mother washing his clothes, he sometimes cries,” says Vusi’s older sister, Sandra. “He says he should be working for her, but now she, old as she is, has to work for him.” What makes matters worse is that Vusi watched his younger brother, Eric, dying of Aids two years ago. He saw how, for the last six months of his life, Eric could not get out of bed, feed or wash himself. He watched as his mother, Beatrice, washed her 35-year-old son’s soiled bedclothes daily.

“It is very frightening because, although Eric never told me he was infected, I could see it was the same thing as me. Now he is dead and then I will die and what will happen to my mother and my family?”

The Ngemas live in a collection of shacks in Chesterville township below Durban’s Pavilion shopping mall, a huge lemon-yellow edifice with an annual turnover of millions. Beneath this consumer paradise, the Ngemas – Vusi, Nicholas, 41, Maureen, 33, and Sandra, 46 – all live from their mother’s pension.

“These things you see here, the TV and the radio, I brought them with me,” says Sandra, who recently rejoined the family after leaving her abusive husband. “At least it is better for Vusi now because he can listen to the radio.” Vusi admits that the radio helps to ease the long and tedious days.

“There is nothing that I do. I get washed. My mother brings me my breakfast porridge in bed. Usually, I only get up at around 1pm. Then I sit and listen to the radio for a while. After I am tired of sitting, I go and lie down again.” Even when he has energy, Vusi says he never ventures out anywhere except to the clinic because people are starting to say that he looks like someone with ingculazi (Aids).

Vusi’s nights are filled with intense discomfort and despair. “I can’t sleep because I have problems with my skin. I have a rash, especially here,” he says, indicating his groin. “I am always scratching. At night I can’t sleep because my whole body itches. Sometimes I don’t sleep until 5am. And a new thing has just started. This is a pain in my throat. I find it difficult to swallow and my lips are dry and also wet as if the breath coming out is hot.”

Vusi’s anguish is heightened when he thinks of his pre-HIV past, when he had a job, a live-in girlfriend and enjoyed nights out with his friends. His eyes fix on a pair of flashy sunglasses displayed on the TV, a remnant from a carefree life.

He fetches a handful of well-worn photographs. In one, he poses in a Chris Hani T-shirt. In another, he is being awarded a certificate at KIC, the appliance firm he used to work for in Mandini in northern KwaZulu-Natal. In a third, we catch a glimpse of his girlfriend in a blue T-shirt, looking startled.

“She left me after I told her. She kept saying she would also come for an HIV test, but she was always delaying.

“Then I was in hospital for a long time with TB. I came out of hospital and after a while she left. I don’t know what has happened to her because we did not stay in touch. I don’t know if she is still alive because she also had the signs.”

He last had a girlfriend in1994, after which he decided to forsake all sexual relationships “because I don’t want to spread this thing around”.

Vusi has been living with the oppressive knowledge that he has been HIV-positive since 1990. He found out after he tried to donate blood.

“I gave blood twice but the third time, they said I mustn’t any more because I have this thing in my blood. I felt very bad emotionally and I became very sick. I started getting weaker and weaker. I was always sick. Then I was in hospital for a long time, about six months, because I had TB.”

“He was very sick that time,” says Sandra. “We were so worried.”

At that stage, Vusi’s family did not know he had HIV. It took him two years to pluck up the courage to tell them. He did so after he was retrenched from KIC in 1992 and decided to join his family in Chesterville.

“All that time I was thinking about this sickness but I told no one and it made me feel sick inside. It was better after I told my family because they accepted me.” His mother, Beatrice, a quiet, dignified woman, remembers it well. “The day he told us, he cried and we all cried. It felt as if his future had been taken away.” Plainly, the Ngemas are a close and caring family. But Aids has cast a huge shadow over their lives and the way they relate to one another.

Beatrice confides in a whisper that she fears for her own health, as she is the one who cared for Eric and is now starting to do the same for Vusi.

“We are a combined family and they are understanding. But the problem lies with me,” says Vusi remorsefully. “When I am sitting alone and thinking about all of this and one comes to disturb me, I get very cross. I lose my temper and I get angry.”

Maureen says the family has come to accept Vusi’s moodiness and they try not to disturb him when he is distressed and withdrawn. But this is difficult to do as he is clearly suffering.

“I feel sick inside. I nearly died with Eric. I don’t want Vusi to die. He has been a very good brother to us.”

Peter Adams – Life with access to anti-retroviral drugs

– Health-e News Service.