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12.12.05 Tuesdays Reflection

Before I started reading Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis, someone had

warned me that it was a moving book. That didn't surprise me. I knew that

Stephen Lewis has served for 22 years in various roles with the United

Nations. His present role is UN Secretary-General's special envoy for

HIV/AIDs in Africa. I had been moved by documentaries and reports in which

he appeared.

Nevertheless I wasn't ready to read what I found on page 2:

In July 2005, I was travelling to Kenya, visiting an association of women

living with AIDS in a slum suburb of the city of Nairob. The slum was

teeming with orphans, being cared for by the women left alive. In every such

instance, there's always some kind of "performance" for the visitors, as

though the encounter would be incomplete or marred without it. We gathered

outside onne of the crumbling homes, where six children, ranging in age from

five to twelve, wearing ragged green school uniforms, chanted the largely

tuneless, funereal dirge of their own composition: "Here we are, the

orphans, carrying our parents in their coffins to their graves." The song

ended with the words "Help, Help, Help." And then there came forward a girl

of ten, a translator at her side, to describe the last remnants of her

mother's life. It was awful. The mother had clearly died only a few days

before, and as the young girl described the journeys in and out of the

hospital, and her mother's final hours, she wept so uncontrollably, her

words strangled in loss, the tears gushing - not falling, or streaming, or

pouring, but gushing - down her cheeks and onto her sweater and then to the

ground, as though in this one child, in this one moment, all the untold

agony of the pandemic was incarnate.

Stephen Lewis believes that if the members of the G-8 which include the USA

and Canada were to hold to their promise to consecrate 0.7% of their GNP to

international aid - real aid - to meeting the Millennium Goals, the ravages

of AIDS and poverty would be arrested. Can we in this Advent season join our

voices to those asking their government to carry out what they have

promised? Let us be like John the Baptist a voice crying out in the desert.

As Stephen Lewis let us join this "race against time."

Cecily