Mr. Ayumba looked anxious as he sat watching his wife narrate his story. For some reason, he seemed unable to express himself. When I asked the wife why he was unable to talk, she said his voice was hoarse, so he preferred not to talk.

“I can’t believe I am no longer living in an IDP camp in Pabbo although the bad memories are still there. It is a different life now where people are living freely in their villages.

Monica Atto was abducted by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as a child but escaped and now lives in a suburb of Gulu, northern Uganda, with her five children, eking out a living making paper beads.

Jemima Mwende brought her son Kevin to the clinic. He was one of the few children who didn’t seem to have major health problems, although his mother complained his appetite was poor.

“I left Padibe IDP camp last year on 1 November. I moved to my new home outside the camp where I was renting a room for my family. I bought the plot in 2007 for 1,600,000 Shillings [US$800]. I bought it for my children; it will help them when I die.

Elias Sempindo, 72, thought he would spend his twilight years doting on his grandchildren; instead, the retired medical officer is back treating patients at a clinic in Morogoro, 190km west of Tanzania’s commercial capital, Dar es Salaam.

After stabilizing Akinyi with fluids and oxygen, we put her in an ambulance, which rushed her to the hospital for admission. She stayed in the emergency ward for about three days, where she was put on IV (intravenous) fluids.

Faced with high food prices, low income and barely a patch of arable land, hundreds of residents of Nairobi’s densely populated slums have adopted a novel form of intensive agriculture: a farm in a sack.

The Kenya Prisons Service has won praise for its HIV programmes, including education, testing and the provision of anti-retroviral drugs to prisoners, but specialists say unless the issue of unprotected sex is addressed, HIV transmission will continue unchecked.

Our first week in Kibera was largely uneventful. The clinic did not get as busy as we had anticipated. We were told that word was still getting round, and that in time, people would come, “once they have learnt to trust us.

Stephen Mukasa, 23, a fisherman on East Africa’s Lake Victoria, is more terrified of drowning than he is of dying from an AIDS-related illness.

If you were a fishmonger in Kisumu, a city on Lake Victoria in western Kenya, you would have to sleep with the fishermen to get stock to sell so you could make a living