Tuesday, December 1st - World AIDS Day

On November 18th, I attended an educational day entitled, Innovations in Palliative Care, “And Justice For All? The Jury is Out.”, put on by the McMaster University Health Sciences’ Department of Family Medicine, Division of Palliative Care. As always, these days are excellent learning opportunities. One of the speakers that day was Dr. Elizabeth Latimer, a Palliative Care Consultant Physician and Professor in Palliative Care.

Dr. Latimer offered this meditation,

“I will seek to know who you are,
I will support your sorrow,
I will strive to ease your pain,
I will walk with you.”
Elizabeth Latimer

Dr. Latimer is a very compassionate healer and her words are wise. And I find this meditation of hers particularly poignant considering it is World AIDS Day this coming Tuesday, December 1st.

Since 1988, World AIDS Day has been an international day of HIV/AIDS awareness around the world.

This Week’s Suggestion:

Let us sit quietly for a few moments each day of this week with Dr. Latimer’s meditation and consider who that “you” in her meditation is for each one of us. How can we seek to know, support, walk with and strive to ease the pain of that Earth Family member before us?

Getting To Know Our Neighbours:

It is the grandmothers and great-grandmothers who are caring for the 15 million children in sub-Saharan Africa, orphaned by AIDS.


Stephen Lewis says they are the ones, “holding the continent together” as they parent, single handedly, as many as 10 to 15 grandchildren in their simple and often inadequate homes.


Through the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign and other relief programs around the world, grandmothers (and want-to-be grandmothers) worldwide support these courageous and indomitable women in their mission to support their parentless grandchildren.

A Fact or Two:

Every day, more than 6,500 people are infected with HIV – that’s about 50 people every minute.

Every hour, 40 children die of AIDS.

Presently, 33 million people are living with HIV

There were 2.5 million new HIV infections in 2007.

There were 2.1 million deaths due to HIV/AIDS in 2007 – 330,000 of these were children.

In 2007, 4 million people with HIV were treated for the infection. That was a 46% increase from 2006.

Most people with HIV/AIDS will die within 3 years if they are denied care.

Women account for 50% of all HIV/AIDS cases in the world. In Africa, that percentage is as high as 70%.

Sub-Saharan Africa is hardest hit by this pandemic – 22.5 million people, the majority of these are females between the ages of 15 and 24 years.

It is estimated that by 2010, 40 million children will be orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

As a result, a large number of orphans are parented by siblings, some no older than 9 or 10 years of age.

Grandmothers are most often the caregivers of their orphaned grandchildren.
(Information from Oh Africa, Medecins sans Frontieres, Stephen Louis Foundation, William Clinton Foundation and Engendered Health)

What Can We Do?

1.
Wear a red ribbon on World AIDS Day to show your support.
“The red ribbon is worn as a sign of support for people living with HIV. Wearing a red ribbon for World AIDS Day is a simple and powerful way to show support and challenge the stigma and prejudice surrounding HIV and AIDS that prevents us from tackling HIV […] internationally.” (http://www.worldaidsday.org/)

2.
Donate Aeroplan Miles on December 1st
On December 1st (this day only) Aeroplan will match every mile donated to the Stephen Lewis Foundation through the Beyond Miles program.
2.5 million miles are needed to support the upcoming Swaziland African Grandmothers Gathering in March 2010. This Gathering is a chance for African grandmothers to meet, share, network, tell stories, plan strategies and support each other in their ongoing challenge to support their grandchildren.
To have your Aeroplan miles double in value, donate to:
www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/aeroplan
or go to
http://www.aeroplan.com/use_your_miles/donate_miles/charity.do?donationsAE=917989352


3.
A small amount goes a long way.
Consider a holiday gift to Oh Africa, (http://www.ohafrica.ca/), an organization that runs a HIV/AIDS program in Lesotho. Almost 24% of all adults in Lesotho, between the ages of 15 and 49 years, are infected with the virus.
Since Oh Africa began five years ago, 11,000 HIV patients have been registered and cared for at the Tsepong Clinic in that country by Canadian health care professionals working with their Basotho collegues.
See the Websites for some other organizations that run HIV/AIDS programs.

Media:

Websites:

Medecins sans Frontieres/Doctors without Borders
http://www.msf.org/

OH Africa
http://www.ohafrica.ca/

Stephen Lewis Foundation
http://www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/

Video:

Aylinne and her 60 Children
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFIdq8rnLXM

Marie da Silva and the Jacaranda Foundation
http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=3916

Half Life

We walk through half our life
as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open
our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.
Stephen Levine
(Breaking the Drought)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Half_life.html

Earth Family First,
maureen
Photos by Google Images