Why Should I Care?
Dearest Viewer,
I hope you are strongly considering coming to the 2007 LECOM AIDS Summit. Thank you for your interest. I want to urge you to take this opportunity to education yourself and engage in one of the greatest crisis our world faces.
You might be asking yourself, or your friends might ask you a question. What do I have to do with HIV/AIDS? Well, that's your choice.
Let me tell you about a friend of mine who didn't have a choice.
I met Jane in Kibera, the largest slum in East Africa. She worked as a counselor in the sewage filled slum, home to nearly a million, half of which are estimated to be HIV positive. Jane helped women with HIV manage their disease, find a trade, and raise their children. Jane herself was HIV positive, but seemed hopeful and healthy. She said she had been very sick but at that time was doing quite well.
When Jane was 13, she was married off to a man in her village. She was a commodity. Girls with access to education have more choices, but Jane wasn't so lucky. Early marriage was her only option. She told me she had always been faithful to her husband, and that he was a good man. Jane was his third wife.
It was one of her co-wives who first got sick. Her husband was next to fall ill. Jane will never how the virus first infected her family. Was if it was her husband or one of her co-wives who was unfaithful? All Jane knows is that now her husband was dead and she too was infected.
Jane and her surviving co-wife began to be treated differently by the people in their village. The disdain escalated to hostility and then to outright violence, and Jane was forced to leave her village and the only life she had ever known. Her only choice was to move to the crushingly crowded, filthy slum to eek out a new life, sick with HIV. Now she is the sole supporter of not only her own children, but also the children of her deceased co-wives.
You have choices. Due to your place of birth, your economic status, and the resources available to you, you will largely choose what career to pursue, where to live, when to reproduce.
Jane didn't have a choice. Will you use your choices-your education, your time, your talents, your money-to fight for those like Jane?
Come and learn. We'll see you April 21st to join the fight.
