We have been providing counseling and home based care to our clients and throughout these suburbs since last year. The evictions have hit us hard. Almost all twenty of the clients in this suburb were affected and their houses demolished. It’s a terrible tragedy. Out of my twenty clients, five have already died while sleeping out in the open. If you look just across (pointing to a pile of furniture with a plastic sheet on top), underneath there’s a very sick woman in there. Just this morning we attended the funeral of one woman who died leaving behind a five-year-old child. They were sleeping in the open. These conditions are not good for already sick people and as you can see today it has been raining. We don’t have the statistics of all those that have been affected and where they might have gone and that is why we are trying to collect data so that we can follow up on them. The Ministry of Health hasn’t even been in touch or the local council. They are just not interested.116 According to local NGO health personnel in Harare, the disruption of treatment programs is likely to lead to resistance to anti-retroviral drugs and an increase in opportunistic infections. One local NGO health official told Human Rights Watch: Hundreds of people are now going to die because they will develop resistance because they can’t get access to the drugs. People who are on the six combined anti-retroviral drugs one of which is Nevirapine will develop resistance because it has a long shelf life in the body. Those who are borderline stage 3 and 4 are going to become terminally ill. Those who were in recovery are going to regress. A lot of new born babies and small babies are going to die. The effect of stress on people living with HIV is unchronicled but it is there. When you add malnutrition and the cold it is terrible. When you treat people with HIV you are constantly treading a fine line to ensure they don’t regress and this has pushed us over the line. For every person we don’t treat here, it affects another ten.117 116 Human Rights Watch interview, Mutare, June 24, 2005. 117 Human Rights Watch interview, Harare, July 1, 2005. 29