Wall Street Journal - July 9, 2001
Robert Block, Staff Reporter

Two years ago it was Julia, a shivering skeleton of a woman found wrapped in newspapers inside a hovel made of trash. Mrs. Bailey put her in the truck and drove to an AIDS hospice, where Julia was bathed, fed and given basic medical care. Treated with kindness and support, she gained weight, and her spirits improved for the 10 months before she died of chickenpox at age 38.

Then there was James Khubuso. Disowned by his family after he got sick with AIDS and lost his mining job, Mr. Khubuso, 59, scavenged in the dump until he became too feeble to get out of the way of trucks unloading trash. Mrs. Bailey pulled him out from under a pile of refuse a few months ago and rushed him to a hospital. She then found him a room at a Christian mission.

Standing on the dump as an army of destitute men and women scoured the heap for anything they could eat or sell, Mrs. Bailey tried to recall the names of the other discarded human beings she has found, when suddenly she spied a sick kitten. She abandoned the conversation to organize a cat-rescue mission.

Mrs. Bailey runs Community Led Animal Welfare, or CLAW, a project of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which is based in Maine. CLAW is dedicated to bringing basic veterinary care to the poorest of South Africa's poor, the dogs and cats of the country's townships. But Mrs. Bailey's focus is shifting from pets to people as AIDS ravages local communities already battling poverty, ignorance and a government health-care system in shambles.

With an estimated 4.7 million people here infected with the HIV virus and 1,700 new infections daily, AIDS is a well-publicized epidemic. Yet the disease remains shrouded in secrecy and denial. And despite widespread education campaigns, AIDS still leaves its victims rejected by relatives and friends just when victims need comfort, compassion and support.

Health workers tell stories of AIDS sufferers abandoned in wheelbarrows outside hospitals or clinics by families too afraid or ashamed to look after them. Babies and sometimes adults are deserted in public toilets or thrown into Dumpsters. In other cases the sick are brought to garbage dumps like the one here next to an old gold mine in Kagiso, 35 miles west of Johannesburg.

Here they are left to scavenge for survival with the mangy dogs they live among. Paradoxically, though, the dogs have become their salvation because of the woman people call "Mrs. Cora, the animal social worker."

Since 1991, Mrs. Bailey and her assistant, De Villiers Katywa, 46, have been navigating the dirt roads of western Johannesburg in cars and trucks loaded with pet food, flea dip, syringes, serums and pills to stop worms, rabies and distemper. People wait for them by the hundreds in empty fields or on street corners carrying their best friends in blankets, cardboard boxes, in canvas bags and on pushcarts. On average Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Katywa, neither of them formally trained as veterinarians, see more than 700 animals a week in some of the most appalling conditions imaginable.

Mrs. Bailey founded CLAW in the belief that the needs of animals and people are the same. But it wasn't until AIDS that she realized how right she was. In the slums and shantytowns where she works, even dogs have venereal diseases. "It's poverty and too many sexual partners," Mrs. Bailey explains as she examines the raw underside of a small mongrel brought to her by a toothless, drunk young man. "It's the same with their owners," she whispers, pulling out a huge syringe and vial of doggy medicine.

She knows this from personal experience. Two years ago, people living around the dump started approaching her and dropping their pants to reveal their own sexually transmitted diseases. "It was incredible," she recalls. "They would take De Villiers and me around the side of the truck and say, 'Look, I have the same as Fluffy. Will your medicine make me better, too?' "Her response was to round up all the people on the garbage dump suffering from "the sex sickness," about 50 of them in all, and take them to a local clinic for treatment.

Doctors associate the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases in South Africa with the rapid spread of AIDS. The government says it has adopted an aggressive plan to treat infections such as syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia, but out here in the poorest townships there are no visible signs of any health-care program. Mrs. Bailey is the closest thing to a medical service many people have ever seen. And her willingness to help has opened a tap she can't shut off. Her assistance is in ever-greater demand.

In Kliptown, a slum in the middle of Soweto, Mrs. Bailey was on her way to collect some dogs for sterilization when a woman stepped in the road waving the pickup to a stop. Her name was Marie Eamon and her two-month-old son was dying of uncontrolled diarrhea. Mrs. Bailey took one look at the child and rushed baby and mother to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. The 3,200-bed hospital is still not big enough to handle all the illness the township has to offer. Private security guards police the entrance to the overcrowded emergency room. Mrs. Bailey pushed her way in to demand that the infant get immediate attention. On the way out she stroked the forehead of a man having a seizure and held the hand of an emaciated woman on a gurney watched over by her small son.

"How can you treat animals and ignore the sick people who own them and live with them?" she asked as she pulled out of the hospital parking lot. But Mrs. Bailey's inability to resist pleas for help can drive even her most ardent supporters crazy. "Sometimes we love her to bits, and sometimes we hate her with a passion," says Lynette Nel, the clinical psychologist at Sparrows Nest, an AIDS hospice where Mrs. Bailey often brings sick people she comes across. "Whether we have space for them or not, she brings people here and we end up taking them. But the fact is that she goes to places where we would not be."

The stress of being a one-woman aid agency is tremendous. On a rainy day in Eldorado Park in Soweto, she came across a dog lying on its back and shivering in a muddy yard. Its tongue was hanging out, and its breath was shallow. When she banged on the door of the house asking for the owner, the man who answered just shrugged.

She swept the animal up in her arms, and the dog lost control of its bladder. Children watching through the window laughed and hurled insults as Mrs. Bailey raced to get the dog to a syringe of sodium pentathol that would put it out of its misery. Death beat her to the medical kit in the back of the truck. She put the limp animal down gently and lit a cigarette.

"Oh I know it seems crazy to care about animals in the midst of so much misery. But we have to try to create a gentler society," she said. "If children can treat an animal like that, how can you expect them to show respect to people?" Then she folded her arms and cried softly in the rain.

Write to Robert Block at bobby.block@wsj.com

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