Meeting AIDS

We're encouraging everyone to pick up a prayer calendar in the atrium, as well as a string bracelet to help remind you to pray daily during these six weeks.

Today's prayer request on the calendar is "Pray for the end of AIDS in Africa and around the world." Since I am a stranger to AIDS, I've been reading some books on the topic, the latest entitled An African Awakening written by Valerie Bell. Valerie is incredibly gifted with words and has written several books. She's wife to the executive vice president of the Willow Creek Association, and I'll share her story of the first time she "met AIDS" on a trip to Kenya.


That morning, with Christo's teaching emboldening us, we leave the classroom and enter the field. Faith, a little girl of about four, is our introduction to AIDS. They've dressed her for our visit in her best- a pink crinoline party dress. I'd guess it was vintage missionary barrel, circa 1950's. Really, I could have worn that dress as a child. She is stoic, as if the spark of life has been sucked from her small body. Her eyes are dulled by fever. Her too-thin arms and legs dangle limply from her body. Clearly, she is failing.


Fiona, a World Vision staffer, fills in this little girl's story. Faith's mother and father both died of AIDS-related complications, leaving four young children, including Faith, who was infected with HIV. Ashina, Faith's married older sister, herself a mother of four, took in her four orphaned siblings. Ashina's husband was wealthy by Maasai standards; he owned a herd of more than two hundred cattle, plus many sheep adn goats. But he felt strongly stigmatized by Faith's HIV presence in their home. Soon he forced his wife to choose between him- with the security and support he provided-and her orphaned brothers and sisters. Ashina chose her siblings. Consequences quickly followed: Ashina's husband abandoned them, taking all their cows, a Maasai's primary source of income and food. Putting his family behind him, he moved to another village and started a new family. Ashina receives no help from him, and without a source of income, she struggles to provide for her family of eight children.

Holding Faith in her arms, Fiona finishes this family's dire story with Faith's medical prognosis- this four year old weighs only 16 pound. Unfortunately, Faith is three pounds too underweight to be considered a candidate for antiretroviral treatments. She is too weak, too little. With our without drugs, she is dying. The precious treatments must be given to better candidates. As I scan the circle of adult faces in that dank and dark place, the emotion we share is the same unspoken frustration. All the king's horses and all the king's men- all our combined church and personal resources- will not save this child. We are three pounds too late.

If I say that to a person we ache to comfort this child, it is an enormous understatement. She is handed to me first and comes without protest, as if all fight is gone. Every maternal cell in me wants to comfort, pray, and sing into that darkness "Jesus loves you, this I know." I try to make my moments with her count. Massaging her hot little head and molding her weak body to my own, I rock and bend toward her ear, whispering words I know she can't understand but that hopefully contain something of the comfort of a mother. Faith neither protests nor responds.

Later that night, writing in my journal, I find the words that had escaped me earlier that day. Oh resigned little girl. I hate this disease and how it's reduced you. And that dress. We used to call that a "twirling" dress. I wish I'd seen you in it, dancing and laughing with dizziness. Crinoline dresses were meant for partying, not for dying- just as four year old girls were meant to scatter the magic of their laughter and joy into the world, not to break hearts with their suffering. It's so twisted.
Your mother...I can't stop thinking of your mother. Did you ever know her? When she looked at you did you see pride and joy in her eyes or overhear her say to your father, "We make such beautiful little girls?" But how would you know these things? You never really had a chance to be a daughter, or just to be four. I am so overwhelmingly sorry. What kind of a world is it that can be three pounds too late and never know it? There should never be a "three pounds too late."

Reading the stories of AIDS breathes life into the statistics for me. Each person with a name, a face, a family. Each person made in the image of God and made as it says in Psalm 8 "just lower than the heavenly beings and crowned with glory and honor." Reading the stories of AIDS also breaks my heart and brings me to my knees. You might consider offering your own thoughts and prayers on this blog as we become more aware of the AIDS pandemic over the next weeks.