The After-Death Room offers an insider�s urgent quest for a more global understanding of the psycho-spiritual challenges that people face who wake up each morning inside the AIDS epidemic and have to act, to learn, to hope from there.

McColly's is a odyssey that leads him to search out African-American preachers on the Southside of Chicago, Buddhist monks in a remote Thai monastery, traditional [Zulu healer], male sex workers in urban India, and mullahs in Islamic Senegal. Through the lives of these far-flung individuals, and through the utterly transforming experiences of his journey, he comes to a fuller understanding of how cultural attitudes toward death and dying, sexuality and gender, and morality and spirituality affect the life chances and the activist energies of people living with HIV/AIDS.

The journey begins in South Africa at the 13th International AIDS conference in Durban to which the author was brought to give a workshop on the benefits of Yoga for people with HIV/AIDS. Shortly after he�d first learned that he was HIV positive, he embraced the discipline of Yoga to help him face the ensuing psychological and physical challenges. In South Africa he hoped to have the chance to adapt the work he had done in Chicago, where he had shared his learning about Yoga�s healing potential for people suffering from HIV/AIDS and other chronic diseases.

However, in the process of offering workshops in South Africa, he found himself confronted with the deeper issues and ethical dimensions of this epidemic, particularly when asked by activists to join them and come into communities to offer the Yoga workshop to teens and HIV women�s groups. He was directly confronted with himown principles and beliefs when he had to choose to either stay or return to the U.S. out of fear of losing his job and thus jeopardize my health insurance. The shaky foundations of his liberal m�lange of eastern philosophy and Christian ethics began to crumble in the face of the stories of activists from China to Nairobi and seeing for himself the destructive despair that HIV/AIDS was inflicting on a South Africa already wounded by generations of violence and racism. He found himself asking visceral questions about why such glaring inequities around the world were allowed to feed this pandemic. What do you do, for example, when four-year old AIDS orphans grab your legs and somehow know that you need to hug them as much as they need to hug you?

Traveling into this epidemic and having to face the wrenching realities of life with HIV�stigma, shame, and certain swift death�had a profound effect on the author. It challenged McColly to place his own struggles in a global frame, forcing him to contemplate the lives of the majority of HIV positive people who do not have the good fortune of treatment, access to health care and a supportive community. How, he began to ask myself, do they really live? What are the worlds that shape their hardship and their hopes on a daily basis?
His South African trip affected deep changes in another way. Although that society suffers infection rates of 20 percent, he met some remarkably upbeat and committed spirits there, HIV positive activists and community organizers who are shaping not only policy in South Africa but leading the international struggle to secure affordable treatment and basic civil rights for people with HIV. These people seem unafraid of stigma and of death; they also seemed invigorated by the challenge of changing themselves and their worlds. Bearing witness to their urgent passion made him reevaluate his life and its purpose.
He thus embarks on a global odyssey to both teach and learn, traveling to India, Thailand, Vietnam, Senegal (with stints in Chicago in between, and returns visits both to South Africa and other of these countries.

In so doing, he felt his identity change from that of a victim of a virus to that of a member of a worldwide movement that could help reshape the planetary future.

Michael McColly lives in Chicago, Illinois. He holds degrees from Indiana University, The Divinity School at University of Chicago, and University of Washington (MFA Creative Writing). His recent creative nonfiction pieces and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun, Ascent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Transition as well as other publications. His first nonfiction book, The World Is Round, is a collection of student essays on life as immigrants in America. He is currently at work on a nonfiction book that blends reportage and memoir as he reflects on his travels through several countries affected by AIDS epidemic.
Over the last decade he has won numerous honors for his writing and work: The Lisagor Journalism Award for a series on Chicago�s neighborhoods for WBEZ Public Radio, two PEN Grants for writers living with HIV/AIDS; prose awards from the Illinois Arts Council and Illinois Humanities Council; as well as receiving several fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Ragdale.
Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and English as a second language and writing at Northeastern Illinois University.

http://mccolly.ecorp.net/

From Chapter 2: Johannesburg, South Africa:
I arrive in rain. A chill pervades the airport. I roll my wobbly cart into the terminal and immediately a swarm of hungry black hands pull, grab, plea with me for work. �Sir, sir! . . . Sir, This way. Just follow me, sir!� Exhausted and numb from a fourteen-hour flight, my mind is blank. After a decade of not smoking, I crave a cigarette, if for no better reason than to give the pretense that I look like I know what I�m doing.
Nothing reveals fear like indecision.
I wrestle free from the pack of taxi drivers and their gofers, see a man with a uniform and a gun outside a telecommunications service, dive inside and take a seat before a black phone. I open a notebook, stare at scribbled names next to numbers�contacts, my guides for the next five weeks. I pick up the phone as if I am calling someone but do not dial as I watch the desperate black men going after single white men coming off my flight from New York.
I pick the man in the plaid sports coat, tall, lean, businesslike, handsome. Rather, he picks me, catching my eye and boldly walking by the guard to my little businessman�s desk behind glass. I hang up on my imaginary caller, the plaid man takes a hold of my cart, and I follow him and my luggage to his car.
Like him, his taxi is worn but carefully cleaned and presented. We speed through the morning drizzle and drab industrial landscape outside of Johannesburg. I search out of the corner of my eye for the idea I have in my mind of what South Africa should look like. But this highway could be any highway outside of any large American city until I see spirals of smoke coming from the rows and rows of boxlike toy houses rolling up into reddish brown hills in the distance. The townships.
I don�t have to prod to get the driver to talk: petrol prices are up, business is down, he�s broke, taxi wars and car-jackings make his work more dangerous. He fidgets, drives too fast, glances my way as if trying to figure out why I have sat in the front instead of in back. Then he launches into a monologue about fighting for the ANC rebels in Mozambique before Mandela�s release.
�I come this close to death: dysentery.� He pinches index finger and thumb and sticks it into my face. �This close.�
Feverishly, he is talking faster and faster making it difficult to follow. �I was a soldier fighting for freedom and when I come back I got nothing. I lay in bed in little dark room in back of my parent�s house, wondering if I gonna live or die . . .�
I can feel my lungs trying to breathe for both of us. His jaw juts out of his finely featured face, his knuckles turn white as they grip the steering wheel. We finally come to a stoplight.
If this is his standard tale for the guilt-ridden white American, it�s working. He sighs, anxious, then takes off again nearly clipping a pedestrian. We pass clusters of weary-looking middle age workers in heavy, dull colored sweaters and coats waiting in the rain for buses to take them to work.
He breaks the silence. �Why have you come to my country?�
An innocent question, but for me it sounds like an interrogation. I look at him. I know I don�t have to tell him the truth. He�s just a taxi driver. But what�s the point lying to people you will never see again? It�s like knowingly going in the wrong direction. I recall the advice I gave to myself on the plane only hours before: Someone asks? Come out with it. Make it easy.
�I am here to attend the AIDS conference. You know, HIV?� He nods. �Well, . . . I have it. I�m positive. HIV positive.�
�You?�
�Me.� I point my thumb at my chest. �See the box in the back seat. Those are yoga mats. I�m going to teach this yoga . . . at the conference. In Durban.�
�Are you married?�
�No.�
�You are a teacher?�
�Well, I�m a journalist.�
�Journalist?�
�Well, not really, I�m a teacher�English teacher at a college in Chicago.�
�Chicago?� He gives me a side long glance, returns to driving, then asks: �Yoga,
that�s like . . . for the body?�
�Right, you know, exercises, meditation.� I explain, my hands unconsciously forming karate chops. He is hardly fazed, but pensive, wondering, no doubt, just who in the hell is sitting next to him. We weave through the elite suburb of Sandton, passing gated homes, offices with guard houses, dogs behind chain fences, windowless brick banks and businesses which look more like prisons.
�I�ve seen them,� he says. �They�re everywhere. . . . The thin ones. Then one day you don�t see them anymore.� His voice changes, sounding less sure of itself. He stares straight ahead as if he sees these �thin ones� in the middle of the road and is about to run them over. He tells me of a fellow taxi driver, a friend, whom he knows is sick. �How does he know? Has he been tested?� I ask trying out my new journalist�s voice.
He smiles bitterly. �He knows he�s just going to die.� He shrugs.
�People don�t talk about it. . . . Some woman give it to him. He doesn�t care. He drinks and has sex just as before. He says, �if he has to die, so will others.��
�But you?� He turns and pats me on my knee. �You look healthy. You got muscles.�
I�m flattered but wonder why he has just patted my knee. Then he tells me about some German journalist he took into Soweto a few weeks ago. �I can take you, I am a guide. If you want to go�go anywhere.� He pats me on my leg again, laughing but not really laughing, as he tells me what other services the German asked of him. �Can you believe it?� He asks, turning toward me with this sickening grin on his face.
Thankfully, as I�m trying to feign nonchalance, I see the Hilton ahead. He pulls out a card and writes his name and number with script no bigger than an ant�s leg. I take it. Just in case.