The Price of Mistresses Rises, HIV cases drops

Alone among southern African countries, Zimbabwe has shown a significant drop in its HIV rate in recent years. A major reason, researchers say, is the changing sexual habits of men forced to abandon costly multiple relationships.

"Those extramarital relationships, they're getting tough to sustain," said Thomas Muza, 37, who is struggling to support his wife and a mistress on the shrinking value of a math teacher's paycheck. Worth $50 a month at the beginning of June, it's now worth $17 and falling almost every day....

"Having a lot of girlfriends or having 'small houses,' you've got to have a degree of disposable income," said Godfrey Woelk, an epidemiologist at the University of Zimbabwe. "Being poor and being in love does not really work, no matter what the romantics say."

Muza, who has a long face and a thin beard, was not poor when he started teaching. He was part of Zimbabwe's broad middle class that also included the bureaucrats, engineers and factory managers whom the country's schools, once the best in Africa, turned out by the tens of thousands.

Now these same men find their paychecks tripling or quadrupling some months. But prices are rising so much faster that many are slipping below the poverty line. Some joke bitterly that with a roll of toilet paper costing about 30,000 Zimbabwean dollars, it would be cheaper to stack 100-dollar bills in their bathrooms.

Muza earns 2.5 million Zimbabwean dollars a month teaching, and about half goes to the rent, groceries and other expenses of his "small house."

-In Zimbabwe, Fewer Affairs And Less HIV