Salome Simon doesn't have much. A one-room shack she rents in Majengo, a slum on the edge of Nairobi. A couple of kangas, the bright print wraps she wears as skirts, and a couple of blouses. A transistor radio, some aluminum pots and one little luxury, a gilded bottle of spicy perfume.
It isn't much to show for 23 years of hard work, on the job from 7 in the morning to 7 in the evening, every day but Sunday, when she goes to church, and once a year when she visits her family in Tanzania for a few weeks. She doesn't have a house of her own, doesn't have any savings, doesn't have a plot of land to grow maize or beans.
There is one other thing that Ms. Simon doesn't have: AIDS.
And this sets her apart from the thousands of other women who make a living as she does, selling sex in Nairobi.
She has had sex with five or six men a day -- sometimes 10 or 11 on a really good day -- since she moved to Nairobi in 1982. Through those years, women have sickened and died all around her: Her own daughter succumbed to AIDS last year. Yet Ms. Simon remains bizarrely -- miraculously, she says -- free of the virus.
"I can't explain anything; it's only God who could," she says, erupting in a belly laugh that makes her stout body quiver. She doesn't know why she doesn't have AIDS, when the infection rate among commercial sex workers is estimated to be as high as 80 per cent in these slums.
No one else knows why she doesn't have HIV-AIDS, either. But that's not for lack of trying.
Ms. Simon, now 44, was one of a small group of women identified, and made famous, by researchers from the University of Manitoba in 1990. At the time, the discovery of women apparently immune to HIV seemed to herald, at last, a solution to the AIDS pandemic.
It was a huge discovery -- but the clues that lie in the cells of Ms. Simon and few dozen other women remain stubbornly elusive. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and years and years of research later, an estimated 40 million people have been infected with HIV and more than three million more have died of the disease since 1990, but neither the Manitobans nor the scientists around the world who have joined their hunt have been able to extract the miracle in Ms. Simon, and turn it into either a vaccine or the thing that few AIDS researchers even mention any more: a cure.
This story begins not with AIDS but with an outbreak of a nasty venereal disease called chancroid, which causes suppurating ulcers on the genitals. It flared up in Winnipeg in the late 1970s, and a few infectious-disease experts at the University of Manitoba began to investigate. Before long, they had figured out how to grow the bacteria that causes chancroid in the lab -- but the outbreak had been brought under control, and they were left without patients.
There it might have ended, had a Manitoba researcher not been talking to a colleague from the University of Nairobi at a conference a few months later. "You want chancroid?" the Kenyan asked. "Have we got chancroid. Come on over."
So they did, launching a scientific relationship that has lasted more than 25 years and led to some key findings in a global pandemic that was, even then, brewing in Kenya.
The first Manitoban to go to Nairobi was microbiologist Allan Ronald, who now works in Uganda. He arrived in 1980 and quickly noticed that there was no shortage of other diseases endemic in the area -- sexually transmitted infections such as chlamydia and gonorrhea were rampant. He also noticed that the people seeking help at clinics for these infections all frequented prostitutes.
So the Canadian researchers set up shop in Majengo, an industrial slum on the edge of the city and the site of the world's biggest market for mitumba -- second-hand clothes. With traders from all over East Africa coming to hunt for bargains among the bales of First World castoffs, the market is a magnet for trade, complete with food stalls, tearooms and hostels for the travellers. It's also a natural centre for sex work.
