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.