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The London Times
2006-10-28
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How do people make a difference in the struggle to deal with the only disease ever to be labelled a global security threat? The story of Haregewoin Teferra’s attempt to rescue Aids orphans in Ethiopia, shows how ordinary people — not blessed with Madonna’s resources — tackle the problem. More than a vivid, readable account of individual courage in the face of apparently overwhelming odds, this is an important book.
In a sunlit Atlanta kitchen in 2000, the life of this author, journalist and soccer mum was transformed by raw data in The New York Times: 12 million children had been orphaned by Aids in sub-Saharan Africa. "Who," Greene wondered, "was going to raise 12 million children?" Who would pack 12 million school lunches, cheer at 12 million soccer games, or tell 12 million bedtime stories? By 2020, unless they get treatment, 68 million more people in Africa will die of Aids; a disease that drug therapies have made a treatable chronic condition rather than a death sentence.
Was it, Greene asked herself, possible to adopt one of these orphans? She travelled to Ethiopia, as an adoptive parent and journalist, where she met Haregewoin and entered into the lives behind the statistics.
In 1999, widowed Haregewoin presented herself at church to be taken into seclusion. Educated, bilingual and middle-class, this once ebullient career woman’s life and mind had been destroyed by the loss of her daughter Atetegeb to Aids. But, instead of taking her in, a priest asked her to house two teenage orphans. In a two-room house, Haregewoin began a haven for Ethiopian children.
This is the story of Haregewoin and the children who came to her — often brought by their dying parents — who have been adopted by new families all over the world. Deftly interwoven with these candid, evocative biographies is a comprehensive account of the global emergence, epidemiology and impact of HIV/Aids.
"Adoption," Greene says, "is not the answer to HIV/Aids in Africa. Adoption rescues few. Adoption illuminates by example: these few once-loved children — who lost their parents to preventable diseases — have been offered a second chance at family life in foreign countries; like young ambassadors, they instruct us."
There will be up to 50 million orphans in Africa by 2010. The realities of our global interdependence and shared human responsibility, not altruism, mean that there will be no us without them.
Rachel Holmes is Secretary of Friends of the Treatment Action Campaign, a charity fighting HIV in South Africa.
