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One of The Oregonian's Best Books of 2006
2006-10-22
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Words are her medium, but numbers were the inspiration for Melissa Fay Greene's latest book, There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children."
In 2000, Greene — an award-winning journalist and two-time National Book Award nominee — came across an article detailing the devastating effects of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in Africa: 21 million dead, including 4 million children; more than 13 million children orphaned, 12 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa; and predictions of 68 million more people dying of AIDS between 2000 and 2020.
Like most of us, Greene found numbers that large nearly impossible to comprehend — theater company Stan's Cafe's tackled the problem in its recent piece during TBA, "Of All the People in All the World," by turning statistics into grains of rice.
Greene wasn't satisfied with comparisons or metaphor: She and her husband adopted two children from Ethiopia, and she wrote a book that manages to humanize the epidemic's enormity without diminishing its impact.
The "one woman" in the subtitle of There Is No Me Without You is Haregewoin Teferra, a widow whose middle-class existence in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, disintegrated when her daughter died in the late 1990s. Consumed by grief, Haregewoin withdrew from society --until a priest asked her to house first one, then another, orphaned teen.
Soon thereafter, her charges numbered eight. Word spread that she was willing to care for children orphaned by AIDS, and by 2005 her rental property was home to 80 youngsters, some HIV-positive.
But no good deed goes unpunished, and soon Haregewoin faced accusations that threatened not only her work and home but also her personal freedom.
As impenetrable as statistics can be, There Is No Me Without You would be less powerful without them. Between stories set in Haregewoin's compound, Greene tracks the political and medical forces that allowed AIDS to overwhelm sub-Saharan Africa, and catalogs the West's responses — or lack thereof (e.g., in the mid-1990s, when the tide of African deaths could have been stemmed, drug companies charged $15,000 a year for anti-retroviral therapies that cost about $200 to produce).
Still, Greene knows the heart of her story is Haregewoin and her charges, and it's to them the story always returns. Underfunded and overworked, Haregewoin's no saint, Greene makes clear. She's merely one human being responding to the unfathomable. As Greene herself did with this book. As untold numbers of readers may, perhaps, after reading it.
Greene, whose previous books include Praying for Sheetrock, The Temple Bombing and Last Man Out, will read from There Is No Me Without You at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. Admission is free.
B.T. Shaw edits The Oregonian's Poetry column. She recently reviewed "The Demon Under the Microscope" by Thomas Hager.
