This afternoon I was looking through the local newspaper and read an article on circumcision as an effort to stem the epidemic of AIDS in Africa. (Even after reading the article, I’m not sure how circumcision helps with this.) While reading the words, I saw the AIDS patients I met at the clinic at Lugulu Hospital stand before my eyes. They are no longer the “people with AIDS in Africa”. They are my sisters and brothers. They are the wives who’s husbands slept around and brought the disease home. They are the ones who were blamed for it and cast out, the ones who were abandoned by their families after being raped. They are the children born with it inside of them. They are men and women who get it without knowing the full extent of what that night will mean. My heart can no longer turn away from the headlines but instead, I fall to my knees in tears. Near the end of the article, it talked about a man who operates a bicycle taxi in Kisumu, Kenya. After spending time there, after seeing many men operate bicycle taxis in Kisumu, I think, “Was it him? Did I see him on the side of the road?” He is no longer a stranger in a strange country, he is a man I have seen with my own eyes and I cannot forget him.
Kenya is now ingrained in my heart, Africa will always haunt me, their faces are the ones I will always see. I heard Amy Grant talk about a trip her family took to South Africa to speak at a gathering and she and her family realized how much they invest in material things and how different their priorities needed to be. Since returning, I have felt very much the same. How can we spend so much money on DVD’s and shopping and ignore those who don’t have clean water? How can we turn away from the cries when we could help so easily?
My friend, Carrie, wrote on her blog of those who have traveled to such countries, “Though I haven’t had the opportunity (yet) to visit Haiti or any other developing nation, I do belong to a different kind of community that has a similar sort of paradigm-shifting effect on its members. Once you are a part of it, it’ll wreck you, too.” I see through new eyes.
