"God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them." (Bono)
This past week, I went to Step into Africa, a 3000 square foot exhibit about AIDS created by World Vision. You put on headphones and take an interactive audio tour, assuming the role of one of 4 children. The tag line of the exhibit is "Can you survive the journey of a child?" It was a great time for the exhibit to come to Fort Collins, as we have a small group of people at church right now who are meeting to discuss, read, and learn about AIDS in Africa. We're also following up the exhibit with a church wide African dinner and discussion about the experience this coming Sunday.
The AIDS crisis used to be a big interest of mine that unfortunately fell off my radar over the last few years. I recently finished reading 28 Stories of Aids in Africa (by Stephanie Nolen); each of the 28 stories represents a million people infected in Africa, and There is no Me without You (by Melissa Faye Greene), the story of Haregewoin Teferra, a middle class Ethiopian widow who takes in hundreds of AIDS orphans. Read them if you get the chance; the stories are fascinating and heartbreaking.
Visiting the exhibit and reading these books has reminded me yet again of the bizarreness of our world- we see almost non stop news coverage of the presidential election and the economic crisis, but rarely anything about AIDS. I understand why- it's too far removed, we've never seen anything like it, people aren't capable of grasping the statistics - 11 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa? The numbers are staggering.
I've heard people ask why they should worry about AIDS in Africa when there are issues like abortion, poverty, and hunger in our own country. With all due respect to those people, and recognizing that those issues are also important, I would still say that those crises are not comparable to AIDS in Africa. The disease is literally wiping out an entire generation of people who should be the breadwinners for their families, leaving a generation of children, who if they are lucky, might be cared for by extended family or grandparents. Equally as possible, those children might be shunned by their extended family due to the stigma of AIDS, or may not have any family left and will care for themselves. Imagine your children, nieces, nephews, or grandchildren, little ones aged 5, 6 or 7, caring for their younger siblings, even newborn babies. Think about the economic, social and political disasters that will almost certainly befall a continent swelling with orphans.
Stephanie Nolen puts it so well in 28 (p. 15): "When I talk to people at home about the pandemic, I get the sense that they feel a dying African is somehow different from a dying Canadian, American or German -- that Africans have lower expectations or place less value on their lives. That to be an orphaned fifteen-year-old thrust into caring for four bewildered siblings, or a teacher thrown out of her house after she tells her husband she is infected -- that somehow this would be less terrifying or strange for a person in Zambia or Mozambique than it would be for someone in the United States or Britain."
May we as Christians not let it be this way. Let us speak out and take action.
"For it is the calm and silent water that drowns a man."
(African proverb)
