Also, he said, Uganda contributes too little. Oil was recently discovered near Lake Albert and the government promised to spend the royalties on roads and electricity, but did not mention AIDS.

“And now the paper says they’re buying Russian jets,” another official added with obvious disgust. Uganda is negotiating for a $300 million squadron of Sukhoi fighter-bombers.

For doctors on the front line, the frustration is palpable.

Dr. Natasha Astill is a British AIDS specialist working at a hospital on the edges of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, in a mountain valley with pygmy settlements close by fancy gorilla-tourist lodges. It is so remote that the drugs that reached Kampala in 2003 did not get here until 2007.

After a long day in which she and a nurse saw 118 patients, many huddling together in the examining room to avoid the storm pounding on the tin roof, she broke down in tears. All day she told subsistence farmers she could not, for example, treat the white fungal thrush filling their mouths unless they could pay $1 a day — more than they earn.

She can still give free antiretrovirals to a few; while her hospital’s American funds are frozen, it still gets some drugs from the Ugandan Ministry of Health and cash gifts from wildlife tourists and the singer Elton John. But soon this hospital, too, will make a waiting list.

“It makes me angry,” she says. “It feels horrible. Sometimes you wonder if you’re doing people favors. You start them on drugs, you give them hope, and then you’re not sure you can keep it up. We all knew these drugs are for life.”