He left and it was too late

I go to the local lab for a routine malaria test. I enter the small room where the lab technician works, say hi and perch on the stool. I roll up my sleeves. Just then, a man enters. A spectral flash of irritation crosses my consciousness. I hate queue jumpers. He stands by the door. Quickly, I notice something is awry and my annoyance melts away. He stands very still, and he stand close to the door. He is nervous.

"About my result. What am I to do?" His voice is laden with sorrow.
The technician, who is putting a phial into a box, looks back at him.
"Please. I am not a doctor. I cannot help you." Her tone is dismissive.

By now, she has produced a pricking blade, to extract a drop of blood from my thumb. I fumble to put back my cuff link. My mind is spinning. The roulette wheel slowly clicks to a stop and now I understand. His sorrow transfers itself to me in a Van der Graaf moment: I need to act.

But she already has my wrist in her rubber gloved hands, and performs a practised jab. I am adrift from the world, following his footsteps away, into a chaos of confusion and desperation. Tonight, he will be at the Church, eyes closed with all his passion. Or he will be swinging in the loneliest place he can find to die. She presses the blood onto a thin film of glass, and hands me cotton wool. It is too late, he is gone.

In Nigeria, people diagnosed positive have no information on what to do next. Counselling is rare, and non-existent in the labs. In the ignorance about the cheap drugs now available that will sustain their lives to what is widely considered by those-that-know to be a natural span, their lives are destroyed. Some will pray for deliverance. Others will end themselves. Meanwhile, Aids is big business, for those with an NGO tale to spin. The lack of information is an abstract crime, that will inevitably lead to concrete deaths.