These are the nurses from the Daughters of Charity clinic, Kubwa. I went to see their World Aids Day performance of a play about stigma and HIV.
I didn't expect to be laughing through the performance, but I did.
The story was about a woman who is abandoned by her gossipy market-women friends who find out she is HIV positive. The gossiping women brought the house down.
"Come close! don't you know that everything I tell you is true!" says one.
"I can't believe you!" says the other, The first undoes and re-wraps her cloth, tucking it around her, fastening her authority. She flung a wrist out and dipped her hip proclaiming her knowledge was closer to gospel than anything the Pope could say. Her nostrils flared at the audacity, the aroma, of the rich gossip. Everyone fell about with laughter.
In the doctor's surgery the HIV positive woman is asked to stick out her tongue. Her huge pink tongue appears, her eyes bulge, and the crowd of nuns, nurses, schoolchildren and passers-by dissolved into fits.
HIV/Aids lessons in my school were on the borderline of terrifying. Twelve years ago there seemed to be no hope at all. I used to worry that if you did get infected after all that safe sex information, free condoms, terrifying films and lectures -how stupid were you for putting yourself at risk? But of course that was only from my perspective, in sexually 'liberal' Europe.
A while ago, I spoke to one guy who was reading a newspaper article about living with HIV. He turned to me and said: "Don't you think this sort of thing promotes Aids?" I was stunned. What was he talking about?
"Are you saying that this kind of article makes people want to be infected with Aids?"
"No," he said, "what I'm saying is that if we continue with the message that there is no stigma attached to Aids then how are we ever going to get rid of it? If we say Aids is OK, where does that leave us?"I suppose he meant that if people put themselves, their spouses and their unborn children at risk by being promiscuous and don't face any moral backlash, how will anyone stop the kind of promiscuous behaviour that spreads sexually transmitted diseases?I had no answer for him, and could only reply that people were human, and make mistakes and we shouldn't condemn them for it.
He looked at me like I was a feeble, weak-minded fool.
At the centre of the nurses' message was the line "sex is not the only way of contracting HIV. Don't jump to conclusions about people's morals." But something inside me felt that this was fire fighting at its most desperate.
My VSO volunteer friend at the Daughters of Charity said: "You should have seen how they laughed at the seminar on how pregnant women can protect their babies from contracting the disease. They were falling about in the aisles. I couldn't see what they were laughing at."
The nurses' performance was inspiring, profound and humorous, and I hope it helps those who are living with Aids or HIV. But I suspect deep and long-lasting cultural change must happen before the spread of the disease is halted.