The Girl Effect

I just came across this video and also went to their website and I though I would share it with you.

Here is another video that I watched on their website and it kind of hit close to home just because my wife and I were just in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia a few short weeks ago. Even though I know about what happens to women in impoverished areas especially Africa, it still amazes me for some reason that this still exists in our modern world, and it really helps to see it first hand and hear it from their lips, so please watch the videos and go to their website and watch the rest of the videos and see how you can help. http://www.girleffect.org

To Err Is Human

I understand I've probably lost all my readers by now seeing as its been at least a month or so since my last post. Not that I had owe so many readers. Anyways, I write this post as a new dad. My wife and I got back from Ethiopia last week from picking up our son that we have been in the process of adopting for the last year. This was our first time visiting Africa and hopefully not the last. I have to say it was not all good times though as we spent about half our trip sick running back and forth to the bathroom trading off taking care of Malak.

This is not going to be a long post but hopefully more just to get me back in the swing of things. After having experienced Africa first hand, more specifically Ethiopia where a great deal of Africa's problems are most prevalent, I can’t help but feel like I have made a mistake in previous posts. Don't get me wrong, all the facts in my previous posts are correct and well researched, but I feel like I dehumanized people living with AIDS which was not my intentions at all. In fact I was trying the exact opposite but in doing so feel like I still ended up spewing stats and numbers. It’s hard not to do that because people, especially Americans, relate to numbers and statistics. I worked at Dell for about a year and one of their sayings they like to use is "if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it," and that is true to a degree. What I learnt while I was there is that when you are out and among the people you don’t see number. You see people. Seemingly normal people just like you would if you were to walk down a busy city street here in the US. They have family, friends, jobs, and they go about their daily lives just like any one of us. When I put two and two together and I saw these people and remembered the numbers that I had previously posted I felt like I had actually grasped the full meaning of them and the gravity of the crisis at hand. The only thing I'm trying to convey here is not to make the same mistake that I made. People, whether they are living with AIDS, African, American, or none of the above, they cannot be deduced to a mere number and we cannot understand what someone living with AIDS goes through by equating them as such. Now go back and read my previous posts and try to do it with a different understanding about those statistics.

What'll It Take?

We have seen now that the global situation with AIDS is a growing crisis and we have seen one story among many of life with AIDS and that there is still life after AIDS. Now I want to discuss what is being done in the effort to fight HIV/AIDS.

If you were to go onto the internet right now and start doing some research you would probably find numerous programs world wide dedicated to fighting AIDS. The problem lies in that AIDS is spreading faster than funding permits to fight it effectively. Last year alone the UN estimated that even though roughly 10 billion dollars went to fight the AIDS epidemic they were about $8.1 billion dollars short of what was needed to fight it. These numbers have been exponentially growing every year. In 2006 it was estimated that the funding gap was $6 billion dollars short of what was needed. Based on the MDG (Millennium Development Goals) our goal is to give the majority of the world access to the medicine needed to fight AIDS by 2010 and to have universal access to them by 2015. In order to achieve these goals of universal access funds must be quadrupled by 2010 of what they were in 2007 which means that $42.2 billion dollars will be needed and for the 2015 goals $54 billion dollars will be required.

How are we meeting these goals one might ask? Well to be honest we aren’t but great leaps and bounds are being made to do so. President Bush requested $30 billion from Congress last year for PEPFAR (Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief Program) to be used over the next five years and it passed. This marked a huge precedence because it was double the amount he requested just three years earlier, and the current Presidential candidates have all backed either PEPFAR or MDG. This is all great news but it’s obviously still not enough as we have seen. I believe in order to meet these goals it’s going to take more than just government intervention. It’s going to require direct intervention among the people. Here are some simple ways that anyone can make a difference.

Sponsor a child with AIDS: http://www.worldvisionexperience.org/?lid=1206&lpos=rgt_img_AIDSexp

Give directly to fight AIDS and poverty:
http://donate.wvus.org/OA_HTML/xxwvibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?a=b&lid=85&lpos=top_drp_WaysToGive

Create Awareness: Tell your friends, Blog about it, start a church program….

Sources:
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/goals.html
http://data.unaids.org/pub/Report/2007/20070925_advocacy_grne2_en.pdf
http://data.unaids.org/pub/Report/2007/jc1388-makingmoneywork_en.pdf
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-it-time-to-give-up-the-search-for-an-aids-vaccine-814737.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/washington/31prexy.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1209065294-lxBwzemKblT82wCeF3ZOTQ
http://www.pepfar.gov/

The Story of Agnes Nyamayarwo

I came across this story while surfing the www.ONE.org website and felt that this conveyed what my second point was in this AIDS dialogue better than I could.

The Story of Agnes Nyamayarwo

Agnes Nyamayarwo is a Ugandan nurse and activist whose fight against AIDS has led her frompersonal and family tragedy to meeting with President Bush and touring the U.S. with Bono. Agnes had left nursing to raise her eight children when her husband died in 1992. After she discovered that he had died of AIDS, she went to be tested - and discovered that she too was HIV positive. She then learned that she had unknowingly passed on HIV to her youngest child in childbirth; one of 1,400 African mothers who unwillingly give their children the disease everyday. He died at age 6 and she holds herself responsible for his death. Her eldest son, who is not HIV positive, was teased at school and treated as if he too had AIDS. He suffered severe depression, ran away from home and has never returned. But Agnes refused to give up. She planned ahead for her family, in anticipation of her death,compiling a "Memory Book" for her children, filled with stories about her, her character, herfamily and about her children when they were growing up. But she also looked for a way to give her life meaning, and help prevent others from suffering what had happened to her. She began to volunteer for a community AIDS organization called TASO (The AIDS Support Organization). TASO volunteers, many HIV-positive like Agnes, work in neighborhoods all around Kampala, teaching people and families how to prevent HIV/AIDS and providing support to the sick and their families. It provides food and medicine, promotes avoidance of risky behaviors, and works to end discrimination against people living with AIDS. TASO is recognized around the world as a leader in providing innovative, affordable support for people living with AIDS. TASO, and its courageous citizen volunteers like Agnes, have been a major part of Uganda's success story - reducing AIDS prevalence rates from 15 percent of adults ten years ago to just 5 percent today. Agnes herself is now on anti-retroviral AIDS drugs that have helped her stay healthy and keepworking to help the vast majority of Africans who have no access to those lifesaving medications. In December of 2002, she joined Bono, Ashley Judd, Chris Tucker, and others on the Heart of America tour, where thousands of Americans were moved by her story and inspired to action. This July, while in Uganda, President Bush visited TASO, met privately with Agnes, and promised her that he would care for her people. Agnes estimates that since President Bush made his historic State of the Union promise to help fight AIDS in Africa, almost one thousand of her friends at TASO have died of the disease, for lack of treatment.

This is just one account of the quality of life someone can have when they are treated properly with the ARV (Anti-Retroviral) for HIV/AIDS. The ARV treatment can cost as little as $140 dollars a year per patient, which comes to about $11 dollars a month. More to come.

Source: http://action.one.org/dia/organizationsONE/one/images/Agnes_Nyamayarwo.pdf

AIDS Crisis

There are a few things I want people to understand about AIDS. First, I want people to understand the devastating impact it is currently having on the world, in particularly Africa. Second, I want people to understand the nature of AIDS and hopefully break down the stigma that the majority of people have towards it and to the people that have it. Finally I will discuss what we (globally) are doing to end the AIDS crisis.

The first reported cases of AIDS came in 1981 when it was discovered in several gay men in the United States. AIDS or Acquired Immune Deficiency Virus was at the time labeled a homosexual virus as the only reported cases initially were of gay men. It would shortly be discovered that this was not the case, and that AIDS was indiscriminate of its victims. Cases started emerging of transmission through blood transfusions, birth, and sex to name a few. Once the virus was reported it was discovered that the virus may have had roots going back as far as 1959. By 1982, cases of AIDS had emerged in 14 different nations around the world.

Fast-forward 26 years later and the latest report released in December of 2007 by UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS) reports that there are a total of 33.2 million people currently living with HIV/AIDS of which nearly 50 percent are women, and 2.5 million are children under the age of fifteen. In the last two to three years the reported cases of AIDS has continued to increase but has also leveled off a little only because the newly reported cases (2.5 million in 2007) are balanced by the number of AIDS related deaths (2.1 million in 2007). Of the reported 33.2 million cases of AIDS in 2007, 22.5 million (more than two thirds) of those were in Sub-Saharan Africa, and account for 76 percent of all AIDS related deaths. Of the 22.5 million AIDS infected people in Sub-Saharan Africa 61 percent of them are women. I do not like spitting out a bunch of statistics, and it is especially difficult for me because these numbers represent people who are, and have mothers and fathers and children just like myself, but I think it is necessary so that we understand the urgency in the matter at hand especially in the highest affected areas like Africa. After looking at these numbers it is not hard to understand why countries in Africa which are the greatest affected are in the state they currently are in. It is hard to have a thriving economy when such a vast number of people are no longer healthy enough to work and you can see the progression of the break down from there affecting all other areas of life socially, politically, and economically. It is hard to see anything positive here, but there is good news in that we can help and there are ways of controlling AIDS so that people can lead relatively normal lives. I’ll discuss that more later in following posts.

Sources: http://data.unaids.org/pub/EPISlides/2007/2007_epiupdate_en.pdf, http://fohn.net/history-of-aids/

Introduction

I just wanted to give a brief introduction of myself as I start this blog and explain the purpose behind starting it. My name is Eric, and I have been married to my lovely wife Tara for almost 6 years now and going strong. We currently live in Oklahoma City, and have been doing so for the last 3 and a half years. We moved here from Vancouver, Washington so that I could finish school. Over the course of the last year and a half or so the Lord has laid Africa on our hearts, and through that, a deep desire to do anything we can to help the people who are aflicted by extreme poverty, disease, and malnutrition in Africa. As we began to feel the impact of wanting to do something to make a difference we began to look into adoption. It seemed perfect we both wanted to have children and at the same time we were giving an orphan a loving and healthy environment. That was almost a year ago and now as long as things go smoothly we are just a few short weeks away from going to pick up our son Malak Kidus from Ethiopia. We cannot wait to be in Africa for the first time and hopefully not the last by any means.
The reason I started this blog is for the simple reason of raising awareness. I believe that if people know the truths about the crisis in Africa and around the world about things like extreme poverty, and AIDS to name a couple that they too will feel compelled to do something about it. With this blog I hope to raise thought provoking questions that lead people to re-evaluate how they see these issues. I don't claim to take credit for any of these ideas on my own because most of them I'm presenting in the same way they were presented to myself. I hope they will have the same impact on you as they do me.