ABSTRACT
After spending several hours with the children at the school for the orphans in Golomolo Village, Vincent Wandera, Godfrey Mukasa, and I begin the thirty-minute walk from the remote village down to the waterfront of Lake Victoria. We pass through several fishing villages along the way, each connected by winding walk paths. Most of the villages are deserted, their huts and mud-and-stick buildings long abandoned. Vincent points to several dwellings along the way, telling me that there is no one left to live in these homes. The sound of a battery-powered radio interrupts the soundscape—we passed the end of the electricity poles hours before reaching the village on bicycle—and we stop to visit with several young boys in the process of mending large fishing nets. I had not noticed the silence before this moment, but as we continue I am increasingly aware of the absence of sound as we make our way down to the lake. Vincent takes my hand and explains to me that the fishermen used to come up from the lake and rape the girls and women or sometime pay for sex, spreading HIV along their way throughout the fishing villages. Now, Vincent tells me, “Slim has taken everybody.”
