The name Rouè-Doudou Boicel is hardly on the tip of most Montrealers’ tongues. He’s not Guy Lafleur, Céline Dion or Oscar Peterson. But for fans of jazz and blues, Boicel’s place in the city’s cultural history is secure.

Thirty-five years after he launched the Rising Sun Club on Ste. Catherine, just east of Bleury, following the city’s first international jazz festival in 1978, Boicel is being honoured by the Black Theatre Workshop during Black History month.

He is getting well-deserved credit for presenting leading jazz and blues musicians in his clubs during those lean years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when artists of stature struggled under the omnipresent shadow of rock.

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Malawan Grace Saka and her husband, Enos, found out in January 2008 that they are HIV positive.

They received some medicine three months later. Enos reacted very badly to the first anti-retroviral drug; the second affected his mental capacities. They were forced to seek a third drug in Chilazulu, far to the south of Malawi.

“It is too far,” Grace said. “We need more money. We needed three people because my husband cannot walk on his own. He can’t stand.”

The trip takes three days, every three months. The cost of the bus, accommodation and food are too much. Enos listened to the conversation between Grace and I mutely, and his agonized frustration at not being able to take part was palpable. He cannot articulate in speech what his wife tells us with patient courage and harrowing endurance.

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This is a tale of two countries. The first is Mexico, and so too is the second.

The first Mexico struggles with internecine warfare. Fueled by America’s inexorable craving for drugs, a no man’s land has been carved along the border as far north as Monterrey and along the coast to Acapulco.

Racked by debilitating corruption and a callous concentration of financial and political power at the top, with a third of its 120 million citizens living in wretched poverty, this Mexico frustrates the ideal to forge a better future for its citizens.

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