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RSSEasy to Say
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
10/27/2005
They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. -Matthew 23:4
"Well, they've got to change their lifestyle, for heaven's sake," someone says at dinner when the conversation has turned to the high incidence of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. "I mean, obviously -- if they practiced proper family values and abstained from sex outside of marriage they wouldn't get AIDS. Am I right or wrong? We're doing nobody any favors by complicating this -- that's just the bottom line, and we need to be kind but firm about it."
I'm not so sure it's that simple.
The deaths of parents from AIDS will leave 18 million orphans in Africa by the end of 2010, UNICEF predicts. It also calculates that, somewhere in the world, a child dies from AIDS every minute, and every minute another child is infected. Mother-to-child infection, mostly, although thrrough trade of the sex industry contributes to the steady stream of directly infected children. UNICEF reports that only 5% of all HIV-infected children get any medical treatment at all.
It is true that you won't get AIDS if you abstain from sex with an infected partner. To do that, though, a person must be free to abstain. In the worldwide HIV/AIDS pandemic, poverty almost always comes before infection, and is the most accurate precursor to the disease.
Women shouldn't be prostitutes. But if they can't feed their children or themselves in any other way, they will. And they will not be in a position to negotiate for safe sex. Or for anything else.
And if a husband comes home from working far away, his wife cannot refuse him just because she fears he may have become infected while he was gone. She and her children need the money he brings home. And nobody where she lives has ever suggested that a wife can do anything but obey her husband. Not ever.
And if a girl is given by her father into marriage with an older man, she can't refuse him. This is a frequent occurrence: a popular myth holds that intercourse with a young virgin is a sure cure for AIDS.
Medical workers should use only disposable needles in hypodermic syringes, never needles that have been used before. But in some places they can't get new needles. So they clean the only ones they have as well as they can, and hope for the best.
It is easy for us to prescribe proper behavior for others, behavior available to us because we are prosperous. We have the right to say yes or no. We have options. It is easy for us to remain safe, so we are apt to think it's just as easy for everyone else.
The most potent way to prevent the further tragedy of HIV/AIDS in Africa is to empower the poor. To give them something to sell besides themselves. To educate women and girls and give them the means to stand up for themselves in societies unaccustomed to their doing that. To offer new explanations and new ways of thinking about illness that encourage people to demand treatment and their societies to respond without fear and shame.
ERD walks both sides of this line, assisting local dioceses throughout sub-Saharan Africa in providing direct services to the infected and the dying and to their surviving families, and by looking to the future in educating adults, young people and families to prepare for a time when they really do have a choice.
