A Series of Questions I

A friend of mine has undertaken writing an article for Food for the Hungry in an effort to mobilize folks in the fight against the affects of AIDS. This will be a four part Q&A. Here's part I.

Great questions Tom. There are so many angles to come at this—I appreciate the different voices you’ve brought to it. Anywho, here are my thoughts as they came out—not too organized or censored. If you would like more detail/elaboration on any point, please do respond. I would be more than happy to jump into a lengthier conversation on any of the points. Thanks for taking this on brother.

I. I’m a middle-class American teenager. What good does donating money to AIDS projects in Africa really do?
First of all, donating your money means you’re way more likely to pay attention to what’s going on. Second of all—don’t let anyone limit your vision of the impact you can have on the world—even at your young age. And finally, as a middle class American teenager, you are more wealthy than most of the worlds population to say nothing over your peers worldwide. If you don’t get involved, who will?

There’s a family in Africa who’s father/husband has died of AIDS. Before dying, he passed on the virus to his wife. She is now sick and trying to care for her three children. Because she’s unable to work as long/hard as she used to, her children are now forced to go to work for abusive bosses who are likely to take advantage of them economically and sexually. The mom, as well as the kids, are discriminated against because HIV still carries so much negative stigma. They will have to drop out of school. So when/if they grow to adulthood, they will not be able to make a living wage and the cycle of poverty will repeat itself. This has been happening before our eyes for the past 50 years in Africa. But lets rewind. Someone decides to donate a dollar a day to this family. One dollar a day would provide for the mother’s Anti-Retroviral medication that would allow her to live a healthy, prolonged life. So now she can continue to work to provide for her family. Suddenly there’s hope that he children will be able to finish school so that when she gets too weak, they will be able to enter the marketplace to provide for her and the family. This is just one example. Our donations could help fund clinics that distribute and monitor these meds. We could fund food programs that provide nutritious meals to folks with HIV/AIDS—medication is only as effective as their diet is healthy. We could fund other social services that intentionally break the cycles of poverty/shame/abuse/ignorance that perpetuate HIV/AIDS.

Because HIV/AIDS is a manageable illness here in the US most folks are hard-pressed to see that it is indeed a worldwide crisis of pandemic proportions. In South Africa, one of the nations hardest hit, there are thousands of school buildings full of hundreds children each with only a handful of teachers tasked to teach them—often one teacher to a hundred-plus students. Thousands of the teachers that once were in place to provide a more adequate education are either dead or bed-ridden because of AIDS. And this doesn’t even touch the issue of orphans—there will be 5 million orphans living in South Africa by 2010! (and this is in many ways a conservative estimate—history continues to show us that our projections, particularly with AIDS, have been devastatingly low.) How can any country handle that kind of foster-care/child welfare crisis? How will South Africa deal with a new generation with such a large percentage of orphans? The fact is, they can’t. There simply is no way. Even if they redirected every possible resource to this issue—they could not train the necessary social workers, foster parents, counselors, teachers, child-care providers, etc. to meet the titanic demand. By every account—even the worlds most powerful/brilliant leaders (listen to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s sobering words any time he speaks on the issue)—all our efforts to combat the global disastrous effects of HIV/AIDS, as significant as these have been, have NOT been sufficient. Further more, things are NOT getting better! They continue to get worse! This is where our help MUST come into play.

I know the question was about money, but let’s say you don’t have money to donate. There are so many ways you can partner with others by being willing to serve with your time. HIV/AIDS awareness and education among youth has been grossly inadequate. What if you went with an organization that taught in rural schools in Africa for a summer?