Life Support

The headmaster of a Kenyan primary school, Peter Kinoti Inoti juggles his duties as an educator with the need to support his family, all while taking a stand in the long-ignored battle against AIDS.

I don’t know how long Peter Kinoti Inoti had been waiting for me just off the main road in his hometown of Nkubu, Kenya. Dark had taken hold of the mottled sky, so it must have been about 7:30 p.m. there, near the equator, when our van from the national teachers’ union headquarters in Nairobi bucked over the edge of the asphalt and pulled to a stop in the dust.

He and two kinsmen, all three teachers, had been talking in front of a block of concrete shops. The sign for the Ujamaa Medical Clinic offered “curative services,” and a nearby drinking establishment cast a pale light on the shadowy bustle outside. Headlights sliced through the blue-black of early evening now and then, but mostly people on foot threaded their way through the semi-obscurity. A man in a suit hurried along with big, lidded buckets gripped in each hand and a bundle tucked under his arm. And two boys of 11 or 12 were drawn to the van like moths.

“ Mzungu , mzungu,” they sang out, using the Kiswahili word for “white person” and hoping for...