Africa

This western Kenya village was slowly dying five years ago. One in three people was HIV-positive, then a virtual death sentence. Coffin-makers couldn't work fast enough and the nearby hospital overflowed with HIV patients. No family went untouched, but stigma was so severe that few got tested and the word AIDS was rarely uttered. Today, with an influx of U.S.-funded antiretroviral drugs, prevalence rates have dropped to single digits. The AIDS ward has shut down.

After crossing Africa from west to east and back, the central issues that followed President Bush on his tour all came together Wednesday in the white stucco Osu Castle here on the Atlantic shoreline. With gusto, the president declared "that's baloney" to the notion that the United States was preparing to establish military bases in Africa. "Or, as we say in Texas, that's bull," Bush said at a news conference with Ghanaian President John Kufuor.

Thirty years ago, as President Carter was preparing to visit West Africa, a Nigerian government official asked a member of Carter's advance team whether the president would like to attend a public execution on a Lagos beach. It is safe to say that no government official made such an inquiry of President Bush's staff as it prepared the agenda for the six-day, five-nation African trip he completed Thursday.

The stalwart people of this tiny, crescent-shaped island have fought off invasions from mainland Khartoum for more than 700 years. Early settlers of Tuti, nestled at the confluence of the White Nile and Blue Nile, relied on the rushing river to fend off hostile tribes. As Khartoum grew into Sudan's bustling capital, residents here clung to their cultural isolation, striving to maintain the feel of a sleepy farming village, even though their island is just a stone's throw from downtown.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe skipped a regional summit Saturday addressing the deepening crisis over the country's contentious presidential election, giving southern African leaders little chance to step up the pressure on him. The summit reflected Mugabe's growing isolation, as well as cracks in the usually uniform solidarity with him exhibited by the Southern African Development Community.

Every Sunday, on a chewed-up soccer field in Pasadena, Mexican immigrants play a game they learned barefoot in the dusty pueblos along a remote stretch of the Pacific coast. The Costa Chica team -- named for the picturesque coastline south of Acapulco -- has cut a winning path through the heart of an immigrant-dominated league in Pasadena, capturing three championships in two years. Its players are agile and swift.

In Mexico, the story of the country's black population has been largely ignored in favor of an ideology that declares that all Mexicans are "mixed race." But it's the mixture of indigenous and European heritage that most Mexicans embrace; the African legacy is overlooked.

When Ishmael Dube got his own small plot of land, it felt like justice. He'd grown up a black child under a racist white regime when this country was called Rhodesia. Half his youth was gobbled by darkness: war and prison. He got the farm in 2000, two decades after Zimbabwe's independence from Britain, when President Robert Mugabe urged liberation war veterans to invade white farms. For the war veterans, it was a time of exhilaration and violence.

It is a chilling statistic: 12 million children in sub-Saharan Africa have been orphaned by AIDS. But the figure alone cannot begin to convey the toll of a pandemic that continues to punish vast swaths of the continent. For that, consider the stories of four children featured in an interactive exhibit -- "World Vision Experience: AIDS" -- at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles.

Africa's abundant natural resources have long invited foreign exploitation. Over generations, foreign empires and companies stripped the continent of its gold and diamonds, then its oil. Rubber and ivory were plundered from Congo. Even Africa's people were exploited: captured and sold into slavery abroad. Now foreigners are enjoined in a new scramble in Africa. The latest craze? Food.