It is easy to take the statistics, even one of an epidemic,
and never fully understand them as anything else other than numbers. No emotion
goes into reading numbers, no humanity is necessary to analyze graphs, charts,
or percentages. But there is some emotional baggage that comes with hearing the
stories of those individual people who are affected by something like HIV AIDS.
There is something deafening, something biting, something ultimately
frustrating and scary that comes with choosing to take a walk on the human side
of a figure like: "Some 15 million children under age 18 have lost one or
both parents to AIDS," or "...new projections that expanded access to
prevention could avert approximately 30 million of the 60 million HIV
infections expected to occur by 2015" (statistics can be found at
UNAIDS.org). What does 15, or even 30 million people look like? How many tears
shed, how many hearts breaking, how many homes lost, how many and lives
destroyed does that amount to? How do you measure the social stigma-the
loneliness, feelings of despair and helplessness-or the excruciating pain that
comes with those vast numbers of people affected by the HIV AIDS virus?
These were things I tried desperately to grapple with as I
began to study the history and current consequences of AIDS. What I found is
that the issue is much greater than I had ever thought. AIDS is not just a
disease that coincidentally happens to affect mainly poor, southern Africans,
the majority of which are women and children. There are real systematic,
institutional, social, and economic factors that add up to the highest rates of
HIV AIDS infection rates being concentrated among poor, southern Africans.
These factors together are what Dr. Paul Farmer has termed "structural
violence." Structural violence is "historically given" and often
"economically driven" factors that conspire through "routine,
ritual...[and] the hard surfaces" to constrain the lives, well being, and
mobility of people. Examples can include but are not limited to racism, sexism,
political violence, and poverty (Patholgies of Power, Farmer, 2005). The
majority of structural violence is aimed toward the poorer peoples of their
earth, as they are easy to exploit due to their lack of socio-economic voice. I
plan on posting more with specific examples of these structural problems in a
few days, as I am researching this further for a paper, so don't kill me for
leaving off here for now!
Now that I better understand what's going on...what do I
plan to do about it? The last thing I want to do is sit around and do nothing,
theorize and criticize the situation without getting my hands dirty and trying
to fix it. So this summer, I'm forsaking the beach, the movies, the vacations,
TV, internet, shopping, and whatever else people do for fun in the summer to
have what I'm sure will be the experience of a lifetime. I'm going to Africa.
During the upcoming summer, it is my intention to take my
newfound AIDS prevention knowledge and put it into practice. I will complete an
internship at the VumundzukuBya-Vana Youth
Center in Zonkizizwe, South Africa.
Zonki, as they call it, is an extremely isolated village south of Johannesburg. I'll be
there anywhere between 10-14 weeks, depending on the cost of travel and
obligations back in the States. This youth center's purpose is to provide
physical, emotional, and social support for children and youth made susceptible
by HIV AIDS. Many of the children living in the area have lost a family member
or friend to the virus, and some may be infected themselves. Some of the
children live in youth headed households, or are being raised by someone other
than their natural parents. As an intern at the Youth Center,
I would be responsible for planning after school activities for the children
living in Zonkizizwe. These activities include providing health and nutritional
education, promoting academic progress, self expression, social responsibility,
and communication as well as problem solving skills. Educational programming
would specifically focus on addressing high risk behaviors in the environment
that many children in South
Africa experience daily: teen pregnancy,
unprotected sex, drug and alcohol abuse, crime, illiteracy, and poverty. I
would not be leading these activities by myself, however, as I would have the
pleasure of working with and helping the existing native staff at the facility
to undertake these responsibilities.
Getting to know the staff and experiencing life in
Zonkizizwe like they do is one of the things I am most looking forward to. I
also absolutely cannot wait to interact with the children! I realize that many
of them are not proficient in English, but that's OK. I know about two words of
Zulu, the language primarily spoken in the area, so we'll be even. Finding ways
of communicating with each other should be very interesting, and I'm up for the
challenge. Plus, the older kids will be able help me out. My primary reason for
this trip has always been then children...they are the ones that suffer the
most with no voice.
I have chosen this internship because as a Social Relations
and Policy student with a Black American and Diasporic Studies (BADS)
specialization at Michigan
State University,
I am interested in how policies affect the social development of people. I am
especially interested in learning about educational policies and how they
affect the physical, emotional, and social development of Black children across
the globe. I have participated in a mentoring program called My Brother's
Keeper (a program through Malcolm X Academy in Detroit) to understand how post-
Brown v. Board of Education educational policies have affected children of
color in the United States, and now I wish to experience these affects in the
greater African Diaspora. I would like experience first hand how post-Apartheid
educational policies are affecting black children in South Africa. It is my wish to
compare and contrast the experiences of Black children in the educational
system across the Diaspora, and potentially expand my study into a dissertation
topic on my road to earning a PhD in African American and African Studies. If I
don't decide to go into academia, and go in the direction my heart truly lies--
non-profit work-then I'll have some great experiences under my belt to get me
ready for the rest of my life. I know that if I truly wanted, I could do both.
There is nothing stopping me other than financial burden, but even then I know
that where the will's strong enough to do something, there will be ways to make
it happen. I have that will, that drive, and that passion to help others. I
recognize as an outsider my role is not to come in and play the savior to any
group of people, but to listen to their concerns, needs, and cares. From there
I will work with them, to meet the needs in the best way possible, for that is
all I can really do as a human being. I will fill in the blanks and teach
others what I know for the sake of progress, but otherwise I am happy to be a
servant.
I know throughout the course of the summer, my heart will
break and the tears will flow, but I will move on. We cannot stop and grieve
for the sorry state of the poor in this world. There is a time for sadness, frustration,
and anger, but it must lead us to action rather than to apathy. If you have
time to be angry about something, if you have time to cry, then you have time
to love and time to labor toward bettering it. This is what I plan to do for
the rest of my life, no matter how much it hurts.
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