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The Seattle Times
2006-10-17
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When a rock star decides to get involved in a cause, the world (or, at least, the news media) takes notice. Word this month that Madonna has adopted a Malawi child orphaned by AIDS may help spotlight its destruction overseas, where a lack of money and lack of will have failed to stem its horrendous impact.
Likewise, we hope, Melissa Fay Greene will bring attention to this tragedy with her latest book, There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children. A worthy read for anyone invested in child welfare around the globe, it simultaneously portrays how huge and intractable the problem is while giving it a face and breaking your heart. Keep some Kleenex handy for this one.
Greene herself, the accomplished author of National Book Award nominees Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing, was so moved by the orphans' plight that she adopted 5-year-old Helen and 10-year-old Fisseha from Ethiopia, adding two more children to her brood of five.
But the odyssey Greene describes in There Is No Me Without You is not her own. Instead, it's that of Haregewoin Teferra, an Ethiopian woman who represents a small candle of hope on a continent in crisis. It's a story that moves the AIDS debacle beyond the abstraction of mind-numbing statistics, and Greene tells it well, with the eye of a good reporter and the passion of personal involvement.
Haregewoin, as Greene refers to her, is a stout, round-faced woman with a winning smile. A widow, she was brought to her knees when one of her grown daughters succumbed to what was probably AIDS in 1998. Although despair drove her toward seclusion, she was diverted from her goal when a neighborhood priest asked a small favor: Could she take in a homeless 15-year-old who had been raped?
Her friends advised against it. Conventional, middle-class women living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital city, they were "focused on keeping themselves above the waterline of the disaster seeping into the country," Greene writes. But Haregewoin's emotional pain blotted out her caution.
Starting with one child, she quickly became known in a community where there were few other options. AIDS carried a heavy stigma. Ethiopia's health and welfare network was virtually nonexistent. An orphanage created by Mother Teresa was overflowing. Haregewoin became a last resort as a shelter for youngsters, HIV-positive and not, with nowhere else to go, and soon she was caring for dozens.
Greene re-creates emotionally powerful vignettes of abandoned children and families ripped apart by death and disease. For instance, she watches one little girl repeatedly throw herself against the locked door after two young women, "rocking and moaning," leave without her and her brother. Undone, the writer offers the $200 in her backpack so the family can be reunited.
"Let it be," her driver advises. "They are too poor to raise the children."
Observing such scenes, Greene expresses understandable outrage at the Western governments and pharmaceutical companies that have saved lives in wealthier nations with retroviral drugs while preventing them from reaching AIDS victims in Africa. Intellectual property rights and patent protection be damned, Greene says, quoting AIDS activists who label the roadblocks no less than "crimes against humanity."
The book pans wide to explain the issue, estimating that AIDS in Africa will cause 100 million deaths and infections by 2012, and noting that by 2005 the disease had orphaned more than 1.5 million children in Ethiopia alone.
But Greene is a pro, someone who reins in both her feelings and her facts in service of the single, affecting image of one woman driving herself to exhaustion with compassion and hope.
Ellen Emry Heltzel writes from Portland. Her Internet column can be found at www.goodhousekeeping.com/bookbabes.
