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Faith and HIV
After twenty-five years, the global AIDS pandemic is still expanding. More than forty million people are living with HIV/AIDS. In 2005, five million people were newly infected, and three million died of AIDS. Between 2003 and 2005, the number of people living with HIV in East Asia rose by more than 25 percent, and the number of people living with HIV in Eastern Europe and Central Asia rose by more than one-third. However, sub-Saharan Africa remains by far the worst-affected region.
Every single day more people die of AIDS than were killed in total by the September 11 hijackers in 2001. In Africa the virus has already killed 14 million people, twice the population of London. 28 million, half the population of Britain are infected and will die by 2020. In Scotland, where I serve as a missionary, HIV is on the increase. Scotland's 407 newly identified infections in 2005 were a record and numbers have been increasing since 2000. We have now the highest level ever. New infection rates raised from 300 to 800 in towns like Glasgow and Edinburgh.
In the rest of the world, already 24 millions have died and by 2020 it is estimated that the disease will have taken the lives of up to 100 million people. Some 40 million people are living with HIV today. About 2,5 of them are children. AIDS kills above all young adults, the most productive members of society. The 15-49 years old the teachers, farmers, lawyers, doctors. It leaves behind the children and the grandparents.
In my missionary experience in Malawi (1992-1998) I visited many villages, going past huddles of thatched huts of mud walls, often greeted by bare-footed children standing in their rags and dirty thorn shirts, and I gathered the plea of many grannies caring for their grandchildren in the absence of the children dead mother. Everywhere I went there was grieve for the loss of children, parents, family members, wives, husbands with funerals rites lasting three days.
In the local hospitals I set eyes on row after row of AIDS patients, their limbs skeletal, the whole body weighting some 5-6 pounds. Quite often they were young mothers, affected by constant diarrhoea lay on a mat in the hut until they die. Anticipating their own death with only one worry: "I have nothing left but pray, pray for my children. I do not know if my relatives will be able to take them when I go".