FREEDOM PARK, South Africa -- It was the women who got to him, he said. It was because of the women that he just couldn't go on as he had.

Kevin Dowling, the Roman Catholic bishop of the diocese of Rustenberg, confided this unrepentantly.

"My passion is for the women," he said. "I'm in that corner."

There are so many women here with stories of pain. Dowling heard them, and he did what he thought was the right thing: distributed condoms.

It could have cost him his job and the community that has become his life. It hasn't -- not yet. But he won't keep quiet, no matter how closely Rome watches, so that risk is ever present.

Freedom Park is just one of a half-dozen squatter camps that are home to 100,000 people near South Africa's border with Botswana.

Few jobs for women

They sit, literally, in the shadow of platinum mines, dwarfed by the shaft towers and the great heaps of dull gray tailings.

The mines rely on migrant labor, drawing men from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa's Eastern Cape. The men come for contracts of a year or two, and leave their families at home. They don't earn much, but in a country of 45 percent unemployment, they make reasonable wages, enough to buy drinks in the tavern and enough to buy female company when they get lonely.

Only a handful of women can get jobs at the mine. But they have children to feed, and elderly parents; they need clothes, and money to rent one of the scrap-heap shacks.

"The only way to eat is boyfriends," explained Thembi Maboyana, 38. She came here as a girl of 15. "Today one, tomorrow another one."

It's the ideal environment for the spread of HIV, this vast web of people with overlapping relationships. Surveys have found nearly half of the women here test positive for HIV.

'The place of rest'

Not long after Kevin Dowling, 63, was made bishop of this diocese 16 years ago, he started making trips out to the camps. In one dim shack after another, he heard the same sorts of stories. He found pregnant women in the last hours of their lives lying on the damp, dirt floors; their babies would be born dead or die after a week or two.

The diocese began its response in 1996 with a small clinic in a shipping container. Over the years, it has grown to include a school, a day care, a skills-training center, a clinic that provides life-saving drugs to people with AIDS, and a hospice for those who wait too long and can't be saved. Teams of outreach workers such as Maboyana visit the sick, counsel new patients and urge people to protect themselves from the virus. How?

"They must use condoms."

The Vatican forbids the use of condoms in any circumstance. "Abstinence before marriage and faithfulness in a marriage is beyond the realm of possibility here," Dowling said. "The issue is to protect life. That must be our fundamental goal."

Acknowledgements
This article originally appeared in the 15 April 2007 edition of Grand Rapids Press.