Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1988. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Chicago Tribune (CT) - SUNDAY June 12, 1988 Edition: CITY EDITION Section: NEWS Page: 23 Word Count: 629
Tom Masland, Chicago Tribune
Burning crosses appeared in the sky, rosaries fell to the brick-red ground, clouds sank close to Earth and dozens of onlookers were transfixed, claim people in this epicenter of Africa's AIDS epidemic.
Worshipers also report that they have recovered from AIDS after drinking water that was placed beside an outdoor shrine or after being sprinkled with dirt taken from a dry well dug by young women who were "filled with the Holy Spirit."
"They prayed for the troubles of Uganda, for wars, for AIDS-so many different tortures," said Rev. Augustino Mukasa, 76, who founded the Visitation of Our Lady Roman Catholic Church 22 years ago in this remote farming district near Uganda's border with Tanzania.
"When AIDS came, this part was invaded first," he said. "They spoke about it, and said they could be saved from this. . . . Now AIDS is decreasing."
About 2,000 people visited the church last week for the most recent outdoor masses. They walked along the muddy, 6-mile-long dirt road from the nearest highway to pile cans filled with water beside the shrine.
And they were said to have been rewarded with supernatural events that Father Mukasa says are documented by the photos of clouds and prostrate worshipers that he keeps in a scrapbook.
The priest confidently predicts that the next such gathering, in August, will draw people from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire.
The head of Uganda's $4-million-a-year AIDS-control program says the doings at Mbuye illustrate the extent to which the disease has terrorized the Rakai district, where the disease was first recognized in 1982.
Rakai has one of the highest rates of acquired immune deficiency syndrome in the world. At the general hospital in the town of Masaka, half the adult patients tested in one study proved to be carriers of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.
"The people are just taken up emotionally, I think," said Dr. Samuel Okware, 40, in an interview at the AIDS control program headquarters in Entebbe. "It is a psychological reaction. Once somebody has no cure for death, there will be as many religions as possible lined up."
The latest count lists 4,001 AIDS cases in Uganda, up from 2,700 in December. The disease is known locally as "slim" because of the way its victims waste away.
However, Okware and others working in the program-one of three major AIDS offensives launched by the World Health Organization last year-see a hopeful portent in a dramatic recent decrease in the rate of other sexually transmitted diseases in Uganda. Researchers have suggested that sores from rampant veneral disease in Africa help spread AIDS between men and women.
Clinics in Kampala and in the Rakai district that used to see 10 cases of venereal disease a day now see only one or two a week, and those are mostly chronic patients, said Okware.
"Either people are changing their habits or they're using condoms," he said. "I should be able to begin seeing results (a decline in the rate of AIDS cases) within 5 or 10 years. I'm really happy about that. It's the only thing I can proudly say I have really achieved."
With President Yoweri Museveni setting a continent-wide standard for candor on AIDS, Ugandan authorities have swamped the country with posters bearing such messages as "Love carefully-keep your zip up" and "Beware the sweetness and splendor of sex."
More than 2,000 teachers have been trained in combating AIDS, schoolchildren are assigned competitive essays on the disease, and local "resistance committees"-neighborhood political cells of nine homes each- have been mobilized.
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