While working for a magazine that covers Congress, I watched President Bush's State of the Union address in 2003, when he announced a massive initiative to fight AIDS. Then I watched Congress fight over enacting the law behind it. As Congress hands money to the initiative each year, the same false-dilemma questions come up on Capitol Hill: Who really deserves this money? Do condoms or abstinence education work better to prevent HIV transmission? Are the initiative's restrictions on generic drugs protecting U.S. drug companies at the cost of foreign lives? Why earmark money for faith-based groups with little experience in the field? I watched various dignitaries spin answers according to their political persuasions, but the process seemed simultaneously politicized and sterile considering these were life-and-death decisions for real people and their countries.

Thanks to the International Reporting Project at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, which sends working journalists abroad, I spent five weeks in Mozambique earlier this year trying to see how the global AIDS initiative was working. I spent two weeks in Maputo then headed out to the countryside, traveling the transportation corridors on which AIDS takes wing.

President Bush's AIDS initiative promises $15 billion through 2008. So far, Congress has complied with this massive shift in funding, but the $15 billion is not guaranteed. Each year Congress provides a chunk. Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony along the Indian Ocean in southeastern Africa, is one of 15 countries selected to receive the bulk of that aid. (It's also a designated country for the Millennium Challenge Account, another new Bush foreign-aid initiative, though it has yet to receive any of that money.)

Compared with nearby countries such as Botswana and South Africa, where HIV prevalence rates are between 30 percent and 40 percent, Mozambique is doing relatively well. Its economy has grown strongly in recent years, and, since the end of civil war in 1992, it has been politically stable. Nonetheless, its 15 percent prevalence rate—1.4 million infections—is nothing to scoff at. The country remains extremely poor; per capita GDP is about $1,000, and 78 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day. As development continues, AIDS continues to spread into the Mozambican countryside, further imperiling the economy. I wanted to see the intersections between the challenges of AIDS and poverty.