Seeing beyond the secrets

Greetings to all our loyal readers, and a warm welcome to those who have recently joined Sondela?s circles of contact.

Those who are most aware of how HIV and AIDS affect all of us - through our work, our families, our neighbourhoods, or in wider public spaces ? are finding ourselves having to speak louder, and for longer, in order to strengthen prevention, care and treatment efforts.

Those who remain distant from the face of the pandemic will soon have to do more than hear about its effects with closed hearts and minds ? they will find themselves listening intently, and unfolding their arms.

Official reports issued during the last few months are telling us how hospital and clinic staff are struggling to care for patients because there are too few nurses, doctors and pharmacists to cope with the need for services, and their own health is failing. Our schools are losing highly trained teachers to AIDS, and the rate of teenage pregnancy is higher than ever. Food production in our country is threatened by illness and death from AIDS, which deepens poverty in rural and urban areas. More and more youngsters are sleeping on our city streets, and violence against women and children seems unstoppable.

So many of our fellow South Africans are living and dying in silence, afraid of losing their jobs, partners, families, congregations, friends. How can we rise above this unfolding devastation and keep our hope alive for the future? As social beings, how are we to cope with the realisation that the act of loving union and creation has become, through HIV/AIDS, the cause of loneliness and destruction?

Our hope lies in the open, generous spirit of so many special human beings among us, who care too deeply to blame and shame, and who never give up their belief that we are here together - not to see through one another, but to see one another through. Every man, woman and child, whether they are HIV-negative or HIV-positive, has something valuable to teach the world.

Such special people appear in this issue ? not only those who lead the way, like Anastasia Kweyama from Ntshongweni, and Phumzile Ndlovu from Bergville, but also those around them who are not named individually, but who join together freely to inspire courage in each other and in those who are isolated. They care because they know that at some stage, they too have been cared for, and might one day, in turn, need someone to care for them. The story of the various sets of people partnering to produce the Sinikithemba vegetable garden is another example of this: weaving themselves together with time, energy and ideas to tend the soil, plant the seeds, help their growth and gather the food so desperately needed for health and strength.

It is this basic sense of deep relationship and belonging, between human beings and with the land, that will fly in the face of all the pain, fear, division, rejection and aggression in our society. Young and old, rich and poor, man and woman, people of every faith, culture and race, know in their own way what these hardships feel like. HIV/AIDS is a human emergency that unearths everything we share, so that in the very suffering it causes, lies the key to healing and fresh hope for the future. Speaking out, reaching out, lifting each other up, standing strong together ? coming closer. Come into the circle and tell us your story.

COME CLOSER! CONTACT US:
Judith King ? Editor
HIVAN (Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking), c/o Public Affairs Annex
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041
Tel: (031) 260 2975
Fax: (031) 260 2013
e-mail: [email protected]
Website: hivan.org.za

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