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People Magazine
2006-09-11
 **** Critic's Choice |
After watching her daughter die of cancer in 1998, a middle-class Ethiopian woman named Haregewoin Teferra nearly lost the will to live. Then a local priest begged her to take in a teenage girl whose parents had died of AIDS. That was just the beginning. Over time, Teferra opened her modest home to hundreds of orphans, despite the huge stigma attached to anyone associated with "slim disease," as AIDS was called there.
Greene's nuanced portrait of this heroine places Teferra at the center of a global crisis, but never loses its focus on innocent victims. The U.N. estimates that by 2010, Africa could have 50 million children orphaned because their parents dided of a disease that can be treated by drugs readily available in different nations.
Greene quotes a doctor whose colleagues compare AIDS in Africa to the Holocaust. "We will be asked by future generations, 'What did you do to help?'" Teferra will have no trouble answering: More than my share.
