If I can't be a health teacher

...I can at least write about it.

When I think about statistics, it is often in the form of those textbook charts and graphs: HIV infection rates appear as progressively darker blots around the globe, scars on Haiti, Lesotho, Indonesia. A large dark circle surrounds New York City, where infection rates are the highest in the country. But there is a smaller, darker circle inside this one: take the train up to the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium, and walk north (beware, Dorothy, this isn't Manhattan anymore and your ruby reds may have a hard time on the steep hills).

This is Highbridge, where AIDS is the leading cause of premature death, where three in 100 people are HIV-positive. This may not sound like much, but what it means, on the ground, is that many of those people you walk past know someone--an aunt, a brother, a best friend--who is positive or even deceased. And this makes me think of other circles: the circles of privilege I tread in, where life can be lived at the extreme reaches of advantage, circles that are lightest or darkest based on the merit of their designation, whether it be infection rates or income or Internet access. I observe this not with overwhelming and impotent guilt--as Paul Farmer astutely notes, guilt can be an extremely productive emotion [pg. 93]--but certainly with a sense of guilt that demands justice, a guilt that insists we dive into other circles and blow their borders asunder.

And yes, please, please, please use condoms.