The Somalis are among the newest of the UK's immigrant communities, and one of the most vulnerable to HIV. Gus Cairns talked to Mohamud
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There are 30-35,000 Somalis in the UK. Around 10,000 of them arrived
very recently in the years 1999-2000. Apart from a sizeable group in Cardiff,
most are in London. Few have yet had the chance to integrate or make a
better life for themselves.
"HIV is a recent arrival in the Horn of Africa," explains Mohamud
Yasin, who arrived here from Somalia in 1998. "Only in the last few
years has it seemed to become common." Somalia's chaotic recent history
means that it is one of the few countries in the world whose HIV prevalence
international agencies did not even guess at till recently.
"This means," says Mohamud, "that unlike countries like
Uganda, we have not seen people die of Aids or had to care for them. All
the original misunderstandings and prejudices are still there. It's easily
contagious; only homosexuals or prostitutes get it; the HIV medicines
are poisons - all that."
The people who fled two decades of civil war in the Horn of Africa - the
bit that sticks out to the east and includes Ethiopia and Eritrea as well
as Somalia - face daunting problems as newly-arrived immigrants in Britain.
Somalia was for years a country effectively without government or law. Few
