Chicago Tribune - June 27, 2007
Mark Silva, Tribune Washington correspondent on assignment in Africa, mdsilva@tribune.com

"It's been successful," said Bolinger, a slight, quiet man, leading a tour Tuesday of one of the lush gardens growing in planters in a walled sandlot behind Fann Hospital.

At this modest, pastel stucco clinic, people with HIV or AIDS learn to grow and prepare their own food, part of a holistic treatment in which improved nutrition makes anti-retroviral drugs more effective.

Since 2002, the White House says, the U.S. Agency for International Development has invested nearly $600,000 in the hospital and its gardens. It's a small slice of $15 billion the Bush administration has committed to a global campaign against AIDS, particularly in Africa.

As the president seeks $30 billion more for the next five years, First Lady Laura Bush has come here to tout the benefits of U.S. aid in a war on AIDS and malaria.

"These gardens serve as a great role model for other hospitals [and] communities," Laura Bush said after Bolinger handed her a woven basket and she picked some eggplant and beets.

The garden grows year round, with spinach and kale some of its high-nutrition crops. The gardeners also grow tomatoes, basil and hot peppers called kanni.

The soil is enriched with peanut shells and a little Miracle-Gro-like substance, a booster from the States. They use old water containers and other common household items for planters.

Bolinger started this garden, a few dozen rows of plants in planters arrayed on dark sandy ground, with only a couple of trees to break the hot sun of this city along the Atlantic Ocean.

He also started DIG -- Development in Gardening -- a non-governmental organization focusing on nutrition for AIDS patients, has expanded the work to another city and is eyeing expansion to another nation soon.

"The garden has acted as sort of a support network for the patients," said Peace Corps worker Justin Land, who hails from Conyers, Ga., and is near the end of his two-year Corps stint.

"People -- the patients who work in here -- come, even if they aren't working, just to congregate with their peers," Land said. "It's important for them to come and have that support and know there are others like them."

They sit down to meals at the hospital, sharing the food from one bowl. It's rice and fish this day, a high-protein mix. Most of the patients here are women.

A common denominator of many of the programs the first lady examined are Senegal's young women, who must contend with disease and often lack the education to do so.

Bush also stopped at the sandy courtyard of Grand Medine Primary School to award scholarships to five middle school girls.

The scholarships, like the money for stacks of new math and reading textbooks at the school, and like the mosquito nets the first lady handed out to AIDS patients at Fann Hospital, are part of a broad-based U.S. aid program targeting disease and promoting education.

There are baskets of food, baskets of nets; outside the hospital, the first lady stood with a deep woven basket filled with plastic-wrapped mosquito nets treated with insecticide, some of the more than 1 million nets the U.S. is distributing in Africa as part of a program targeting a disease that kills 1 million each year on the continent. Malaria is Senegal's largest single killer.

"I'm very proud that the people of the United States are standing with the people of Senegal to eradicate malaria," she said. "We know malaria can be eradicated, so we stand with you."

Here, the crosscurrents of sadness and hope could be felt in the soaring lyrics of Youssou N'Dour, a famed Senegalese singer who entertained the children at the primary school.

He sang of poverty and disease, and he sang of hope. Disease "is not the only measure of Africa. Africa wants to move forward."

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