Dawn's Blog

Since today (or yesterday, because this won’t get posted until tomorrow) is World AIDS Day, I’d like to take advantage of my blog to raise some awareness. I don’t know how much you know about the AIDS pandemic in Africa, or how you feel about it, but I’ve recently realized that it’s a pretty big deal. Like a lot of Americans, I guess I always thought it was a terrible thing, but it seemed pretty far away, and there wasn’t really much I could do about it anyway. And then I learned about stuff like this:

•    The population of South Africa is about 50,000,000. More than 5 million of those people have AIDS. 1.2 million children there have been orphaned by AIDS.
•    A total of 3 million people die every year from AIDS. That is approximately the same as 20 fully loaded Boeing 747 airplanes crashing every day for a year. 
•    In South Africa, environmentalists fear a disaster caused by the predicted 3 million bodies that will have to be buried there in the next 10 years.
•    In Zambia, almost half the population is under the age of 15.
•    In Rwanda, 42,000 households are headed by children. *

But numbers and statistics don’t really mean a whole lot to me, and I’m guessing they don’t to you either. The thing is, each one of those children has a story. They’re actual people. Some of them watched their parents die. Some of them live on the streets. Many of them can’t get an education. If we saw children living in these conditions in our own community, there is no way we would let it keep happening. So why does it matter so much that a kid is in Uganda instead of Indiana? Just a thought to ponder. And I’m sure most of you have heard this before. And the question of what we do about it is still a hard one. But there really are starving kids in Africa that would give anything to eat that spinach you just threw away.

I don’t really even know what my goal with this spiel is, but I just really hope we take it a little more seriously.   So what can we do? There are organizations like Compassion and World Help and probably hundreds of others that are providing food and education to some of these kids, and we can share a little of our wealth with them. We can learn more about it.

*All of my stats I got from a book called Children of Hope, and it also includes the real-life stories of several children who are dealing with the AIDS crisis every day. You can get this book for free. 
I will now step down from my soap box.