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Working Together – Report Of The Anglican Response to HIV/AIDS in Africa
In many ways I’m not an expert on AIDS. This despite having been busy over the past six months overseeing a study on the Anglican response to HIV and AIDS to put before the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS and to encourage us Anglicans in working together on the challenge.
The people who are the experts are those whom we have come across: children, women and men who find themselves living with HIV or affected by AIDS and who do so with great dignity and courage. They are experts on the impact that AIDS has on every aspect of life; but at the same time on what the response can be. Both are found in stories. Always those stories are humbling and profound. Inevitably the impact on children touches us most deeply, as it should.
Hard to tell the whole Anglican story in our study, so we focused in on a few small corners of Africa. From Tanzania comes the story of St Albans parish near Korogwe where 70 children aged from three to 15 years – all of them having lost one or both parents to AIDS – are cared for and supported in their education and health needs by parishioners. They are from different denominations and religions (18 are Muslims). There is no agency or donor. The parishioners themselves find the means despite the fact that their own resources are meagre.
In Kenya, Maseno Anglican Hospital provides a comprehensive level of treatment offered by doctors, clinical officers, nurses, pharmacists and counsellors. There is also a children’s club offering psycho-social support. Children can express themselves and get over their anger. Near Kakamega, the ‘Jikaze’ support group was a vital lifeline to 40- year-old Fanhae Emitunga: “The greatest enemy is self stigma” she says, “The church helped me overcome it.” Now her condition is stable and she is able to look after her four children.
The good news is that Anglicans are responding here and, as this newsletter shows, in many other countries and continents. This flowering of initiatives and creative responses is all the more effective because it draws its energy from the grassroots, from the faith and committed application of Christian principles by individuals and church communities around the world.
We worship a God incarnate, who we believe is among us and therefore to be found in the midst of the world’s places of struggle – places where AIDS has decidedly not gone away; where, in fact, it is more than ever at the top of the agenda. One senses that the more we can work together in our response, the more we will discover a unity of purpose and identity amidst our diversity, and the more we will live out a Gospel of incarnation which addresses the truly important issues of our day.
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