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Columbus Dispatch
2006-12-17
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For all we seem to know or care in this country, AIDS has been cured. After all, Magic Johnson is still alive.
But the AIDS pandemic rages outside our borders, turning Africa into "a continent of orphans," according to the United Nations.
In 2000, journalist Melissa Fay Greene read about the African AIDS pandemic in The New York Times: 12 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa already and 25 million to 50 million predicted by 2010.
The "ridiculous" numbers, according to Greene, raised a question she couldn’t get out of her head — a question that eventually led to her book, There Is No Me Without You: "Who was going to raise 12 million children?"
Related questions make up one of the most poignant and poetic passages in a harrowing, beautiful book.
"Who was teaching 12 million children how to swim? Who was signing 12 million permission slips for school field trips? Who packed 12 million lunches?
"Who will offer grief counseling to 12, 15, 18, 36 million children? Who will help them avoid lives of servitude or prostitution? Who will pass on to them the traditions of culture and religion, history and government, of craft and profession? Who will help them grow up, choose the right person to marry, find work, and learn to parent their own children?
"Well, as it turns out, no one. Or very few."
Greene spent several years researching There Is No Me Without You, traveling in 2004 to Ethiopia and spending time with an Ethiopian woman named Haregewoin Teferra, who lost her husband to a heart attack and her daughter to AIDS before founding an orphanage in her daughter’s name.
Teferra never meant to be a missionary. She had planned, after the death of her daughter, to retire from the world, squatting at a nearby cemetery and eating figs off the cemetery trees.
But the director of a Roman Catholic charity persuaded her to take in an orphan, then another and another until her "compound" housed a dozen, two dozen, five dozen parentless children.
While she never meant to be a missionary, Teferra also never claimed to be a saint. Greene first wrote about Teferra in Good Housekeeping magazine, in an article that took the Ethiopian woman to an international audience. Donations poured into her orphanage, and she was flown to New York to receive a humanitarian prize of $10,000.
Not long after her return, and perhaps not surprisingly, Teferra became a figure of suspicion in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, outside which her orphanage was built. She was accused of financial shenanigans and, worse, arrested, and briefly detained, for child trafficking.
"I would watch Haregewoin’s reputation rise and fall like sunrise and sunset," Greene writes.
"Maybe she started out as a saint, became a tyrant, then became a saint again. Or was it the reverse? The story line changed."
In any case, There Is No Me Without You isn’t just Teferra’s story. Greene ably dons the mantle of historian, recounting Ethiopian history; and that of the science writer, exploring the origins of the AIDS virus; and of the social commentator, taking to task the drug companies and Western politicians who should have done more much sooner to help avert disaster.
She writes simply and declaratively but also cleverly.
Describing the clash of the traditional and the modern in Ethiopia, Greene writes: "On a hard-bake plain, 100 miles south of electricity, a young goatherd stands in a field, holding a wooden staff and wearing a T-shirt with the Boston Red Sox baseball logo."
Greene also tells the stories of several American families, including her own, who adopt Ethiopian orphans and bring them to the United States. In her final, heart-rending chapter, she recounts a trip made by the Hollinger family from Teferra’s compound to reunite two newly adopted children one last time with their grandfather.
But like everything else in There Is No Me Without You, the scene’s joy — as villagers pour out of their huts to welcome the children back, if only for a few moments — is undercut by harsher truths, not the least of which is pointed out by Greene at the beginning of her book: "Adoption is not the answer to HIV/AIDS in Africa. Adoption rescues few."
— Bill Eichenberger
