A CALL from the church
A call from the church of the global South to respond to the AIDS pandemic
by Ted Karpf
When the Primates of the Anglican
Communion met in Canterbury last April, they declared a word spoken from
the church of the global South to the church of the global North. They proclaimed
that "AIDS is not a punishment from God." The Primates described the church as being "too often a voice of condemnation," which has led to neglect and abuse of those living with AIDS and those who survive them. They went on to describe a way forward which called for "coordinated
and joint action [with governments, development programmes, health and pharmaceutical
agencies and NGOs] to address the enormity of this challenge."
To Nesta, a 34-year-old mother of four, these words came too little and too late. She now lies buried with her miner husband and two of their children in a shallow grave behind their mud hut in South Africa's Valley of Thousand Hills.
To Thembe, a grandmother in Botshabelo Township in the Free State of South Africa who is raising eight grandchildren since the death of her two daughters due to AIDS, these words could be the difference between hope and hopelessness. Two of her grandchildren are HIV-positive, and more may become so for lack of education and employment.
For Gareth, age 14, growing up in the streets of Cape Town, these words could help him access the help he needs, if his church is listening and ready to minister.
And to Margaret, a priest, these words point the way to engaging her people in ministry, but until they have a means of making a living, along with food, potable water and sanitation, they are great ideas with little or no content just now.
The canary in the pandemic
In a profoundly simple way, 20 years
of stigma and denial addressed at Canterbury marked the end of the silence
of the quiescent church of the South. The full extent of the AIDS pandemic
in Africa alone has been described by United Nations Secretary General Kofi
Annan as "a tragedy of biblical proportions." Thirty million of
the 40 million worldwide who are infected live in sub-Saharan Africa. In
a word, Africa is dying.
The numbers also point to grotesque
gender inequalities. Some 58 percent of these sufferers are women between
the ages of 15—49. Altogether in Africa, only 30,000 people have access
to the life-extending anti-retroviral treatments (ARVs), which illustrates
the concurrent pandemic of poverty.
Africa is not alone. United Nations
Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS Stephen Lewis has described southern Africa as
the "canary in the pandemic" for the rest of world. New predictions
of pandemic in Eastern Europe, India, China and Russia are lifting the estimated
worldwide numbers of HIV infections to as many as 100 million by 2020. To
give that number perspective, the Black Death in 14th-century Europe killed
more than 40 million and the 1918 flu epidemic claimed 45 million lives.
This catastrophe, in slow motion, is being played out against the backdrop of the effects of globalization. It is often seen in systems: multinational pharmaceutical companies making policies on costs, distribution, manufacture and profit of life-saving medications; international mining, resource-management and agricultural corporations making daily life-and-death decisions about treatment and health care; generations of disrupted development due to climactic changes and shifting agricultural conditions; massive unemployment and underemployment; inept and incapable fledgling national governments overwhelmed by the need of their people for basic systems of clean water, food security and public health care; and the relative neglect and indifference to the burgeoning destruction by the most powerful and wealthy nations of the developed world. Indeed, the issues are enough to make one's head swim.
Organizing a response at Boksburg
Nonetheless, the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic has coalesced around the leading figure of the International Debt Forgiveness Movement within the Anglican Communion, Njongonkulu W.H. Ndungane, Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa, comprising Angola, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mocambique, St. Helena/Ascension Islands and South Africa. These are some of the hardest hit areas in Africa where poverty, famine, tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS are always intertwined.
In April of 2001 the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and his fellow Primates charged Archbishop Ndungane to lead the Communion's response to the AIDS pandemic. In August 2001, the first-ever All Africa Anglican Conference on HIV/AIDS was held in Boksburg, a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa.
This grassroots effort has come
about, in part, because the losses are beginning to manifest in other tragedies
like the present famine, caused by lack of farmers to plant and reapers to
reap, as well as political and social upheaval and drought; the slowing of
growth and development to near-stop; the failure of governments to deal with
the unfolding panoply of social and economic issues; the swelling of the
ranks of orphaned children – now estimated to hit 25 million in the
next seven years; and the breakdown of education systems due to ever-increasing
teacher and pupil deaths. What exists in the way of a public health system
is on the verge of collapse.
Financial and moral support for the conference began with the Compass Rose Society, followed by Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD), along with UNAIDS, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA).
More than 54 nations from the 12 Anglican provinces of Africa were represented at Boksburg. Over the course of three days, a consensus statement was drafted and adopted along with a template for strategic planning and reporting on the church's HIV/AIDS activities. The meeting also brought together international donors, NGOs, Christian charities, pharmaceutical companies, religious leaders and people living with AIDS to create a model or template for strategic planning and community development that could be supported and sustained by donors.
At its conclusion the archbishops
of Africa declared, "We pledge ourselves to the promise that future generations will be born and live in a world free from AIDS." Such
is the nature of hope in Africa where faith leaders can lay claim to the
future, standing firmly in the agonizing present.
Beacons of hope
Small beacons of hope continue to give witness to what is possible in a place
where the equivalent of two 9/11s occur every day of the week. Canon Gideon
Byamugisha, an Anglican cleric from Uganda, is a living witness as an HIV-positive
person of what ARVs can do. He nearly died in 1998 due to opportunistic diseases.
Today he and his HIV-positive wife, who was also widowed like Gideon due to
the virus, are the proud parents of an HIV-negative daughter made possible
by an 80-cent treatment of Nevirapine, a drug that cuts by 50 percent the chance
of HIV transmission between mother and child. He is the image of a resurrecting
Africa as he daily expends his energies giving witness to and garnering support
for people living with AIDS across Africa and around the world. It was his
testimony at the Primates' meeting in Kanuga in 2001 that moved them to declare
AIDS the "number-one priority of the worldwide Communion."
Faithful witnesses to the power of hope and commitment are galvanizing the collective will of people across the continent. Communities are coming together to organize their responses. Youth are actively participating in and leading seminars with their parents and elders to talk prevention, which is to discuss the tender issues of sexuality, tradition, community values and mores. Hospices, in nothing more than mud huts, abandoned garages and saloons, are the sites of many efforts to relieve suffering. Even the matter of more cost-effective ways to respectfully lay to rest the dead and care for their survivors who mourn are being examined.
Women's groups, particularly the Mother's Union, Anglican Women's Fellowship, and the men's Bernard Mizeki Mission Society are initiating efforts for home-based care and wellness management. The church is actively engaged in organizing ministries to respond to the burgeoning numbers of orphaned children. Yet for all the work that people are doing, many families struggle from day to day without food and access to clean water, which makes many efforts futile. How can an overstretched family take on orphaned children when they, themselves, cannot sustain life?
Finding resources
The reality is that without adequate
resources to enable communities to work on issues of prevention and treatment,
food and water, their hopes will be scattered on the heaps of broken promises
to the people of Africa. A new sustainable and compassionate mission effort
is needed. The church in Africa prevails in telling its story and now asks
the Communion worldwide for support: financial and human resources and technical
assistance. The Synod of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa, after
unanimously approving its first $2.5 million three-year plan of action – developed with the support of USAID, ERD and a small cluster of participants from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington – drew
up a list of 23 short-term projects and activities based on their strategic
plan, costing no more than $5,000 each, to move their agenda forward immediately.
But who will support them?
At the Anglican Consultative Council
meeting in Hong Kong last September, the African—led HIV/AIDS initiative
called for the worldwide Communion to become companions to the churches of
the global South in a Partnership for Life. The Communion responded by approving
the creation of an Anglican Communion International AIDS Fund, to be administered
by the Anglican Communion Office in London.
Current need stands at $2.5 million for the first three years of what must be a 20-year commitment. The first to contribute was the Japanese Church. ERD is rapidly organizing efforts through a newly created 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation to assist the AIDS-stricken African continent.
Africa is organizing all of its resources, but more are needed. The very infrastructures of churches and communities, where hundreds of thousand have already perished, are being taxed by the burden of care and death. Clergy in many communities have gone without paychecks for months at a time, because parishioners are frantically meeting the demands of funerals, child support, unemployment and now hunger. In a recent visit to famine-plagued southern Africa, UN World Food Programme head James Morris noted that food was only part of the problem; the heart of the problem was AIDS.
Images of a modern apocalypse
For nearly two years, I have been
privileged to be at the heart of the continent-wide effort across Africa
to engage the Anglican Church and the worldwide Communion in our struggle
against the ravages of HIV/AIDS. I have visited dozens upon dozens of communities
and congregations, particularly in southern Africa, where people have come
together to fortify their faith in plotting their tactics against AIDS. I
have met with faithful folk who have struggled day and night to eke out livings,
raise their children, pay tuition for primary school – universal education is not a fact of life here – and
feed their families amidst the growing horror around them. Life goes on,
much as it always has. People rise in the morning to fetch water from a well,
sometimes as far as 10 kilometers away, returning at sunrise to wash and
clothe and feed a family. They go about the business of living, often singing
hymns of praise to the Creator, who called this land and people into being
as the birthplace of humankind. I am constantly inspired by the faith that
allows people to dream of a better day and offers unstinting hospitality
in a place of scarcity and deprivation.
From the frontlines, I can report that there are not yet mounds of dead bodies awaiting burial where I can see them. There are not millions of sick and dying folk where I can smell the stench of death. There are not armies of starving orphaned children roaming through and pillaging the countryside in a frantic search for food and shelter, ready to risk all for a crust of bread. Yet all these images of a modern apocalypse are at hand, just beyond what I can see today.
The structures and leadership of
the church have moved and committed Anglicans around the world to ministries
of hope. What remains is the long-term material, financial and human support
of the churches of the North for the people of the South. Archbishop Ndungane
summarizes the situation this way: "We know of the goodwill of our sisters
and brothers. We also hold to the basic facts that no one should care alone
and no one should die alone. We need everyone to press their faith communities
and governments to the task of walking with us in this journey through death
into life. For we are all working for a Generation without AIDS." l