When we left Kampala that morning I felt the same distaste I'd been feeling ever since arriving in Uganda. There was something almost obscene about asking fatally ill people to talk about their suffering and their fate with a complete stranger. Somebody who, to make matters worse, had flown in from a distant corner of the world – Europe, the West – in which the terrible disease had almost been tamed and turned into a chronic but not necessarily fatal disease. The same disease that now is killing indiscriminately the length and breadth of the African continent and in other parts of the Third World.

I had slept badly because I had been worrying about the task ahead. My unease was not difficult to understand. I was dreading it because I knew I would find the fate of Christine and the rest of them very hard to take.

Beatrice had given us very efficient directions as to how to get there. We turned off the main road and, as always in Africa, we immediately found ourselves deep in a different world, a world usually, but wrongly, called the real Africa. Africa is always "real", whether it be savannah or slum, old ramshackle urban district or a grim and difficult-to-pin-down shadowland between bush and desert.

Christine had two houses. In one of them lived her mother and father and some of her brothers and sisters. When I arrived and got out of the car, the first thing I saw was her father, who was sitting peeling some kind of vegetable I had never seen before. He was unshaven but very dignified. Eventually I discovered that he was about 80, although nobody could be sure exactly how old. He had a keen eye, and was surrounded by an aura that immediately captivated anyone who approached him.