For, ultimately, this virus is about sex. More directly, in Africa, it's often about predatory, unequal and unsafe sexual relationships that breed disease. Mushaninga and his colleagues say the problem in Chikwaka is poverty. Zimbabwe never really recovered from a regional drought in the early 1990s, and the agricultural sector has suffered. So parents often live in Harare or other cities where they can find work, leaving their children in the hands of grandparents or single aunts.
Money is short and adult supervision shorter.
And the men who pass through Juru, necessarily working class and with money in their pockets, are more than willing to buy everything from groceries to clothes for a new girlfriend. And in relationships between rural schoolgirls and cosmopolitan older men, it's not hard to figure out who makes the decisions about whether or not the couple will use condoms. Which brings us back to sweets and wrappers. That's a lot easier said than done. It's not just schoolgirls who cede rights to set the terms of sex.