AIDS
Definition
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is a serious, fatal disease of the immune system contracted through blood transfusions, sexual contact or contaminated needles. There is no known cure for it.
AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since 1981-more than four Jewish holocausts or 22 Rwandan genocides.
In 2005, every minute there were 10 newly infected people worldwide.
Africa has 12 million AIDS orphans.
43% of those infected with HIV are women.
*There are 40.3 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, 1/3 are between the ages of 15-24.
Personal Impact Story
In a small village in Mozambique, Zorah wakes up early to begin her work: caring for her three children, her aging father-in-law and harvesting the fields. Since her husband’s death a month ago, responsibility has fallen entirely on her. She is tired, but she says noting, only gathers up a basket of dirty clothes before heading down to the riverbank to wash.
A doctor who visits the village every week told Zorah that her husband died of AIDS. She didn’t know her husband was infected with a virus called HIV when she married him. She didn’t know that he knew he was sick. At the time, she was 16 and he 31. She didn’t know he believed that sleeping with a virgin would cure his disease.
She didn’t know that using a condom might have protected her from infection, and if she had known, what difference would it have made? She and her husband never talked about sex; he simply demanded it from her. Sometimes he was rough with her, and she would bleed. She didn’t know that increased her vulnerability of contracting the disease.
The sun is coming up over the horizon, glinting on the slow moving ripples that mark the river’s constant current. Zorah washes a shirt. Her chest hurts and a dry cough has been troubling her for the past week. This morning she feels feverish and her body is aching. Her husband’s illness started out the same way. Within a year he was dead. Zorah wrings out the last shirt as she gazes across the water. She knows there is currently no cure. She knows her family will be left alone. She doesn’t know who will care for them.
The tears on her cheeks catch the light of the rising sun. She does not cry for long, her family is waiting, and they are hungry. She picks up the basket of wet clothes and begins the long, slow walk over the dirt road that leads back home.
God delights in showing mercy. Micah 7:18
PRAY
that God would intervene against this epidemic
that he would raise up medical researchers and doctors to discover solutions to HIV
~that God would release Bible teachers to confront the causes of AIDS to see personal and social transformation
ACT
Research the impact AIDS has on the nation of Botswana
