The Point

Thursday, August 17, 2006

It is a hard thing


A grandmother remembers at this week's International AIDS Conference. (Tanja-Tiziana Burdi)

PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER, CURRENTLY ON A TOUR of Canada's North, took a moment today in Whitehorse to address concerns about his failure to make an appearance at the week-long International AIDS Conference currently underway in Toronto. The government, he said, is being adequately represented at the conference, and added that he believed the Canadian government was committed to fighting what he called a serious health crisis; today, he announced that they would not make expected announcements on new funding for the battle against HIV and AIDS because the issue had become 'too politicised.' This should not come as a surprise from a government dragging its heels on an issue its predecessors barely feigned commitment too, especially since Prime Minister Harper still seems to believe the HIV/AIDS pandemic is primarily a health care issue.

This crisis has moved far beyond the dimensions of health care, and has become a serious social and political issue that is threatening the very fabric of social structures all over the world. India recently overtook South Africa as the country with the most number of people living with HIV, and within the next decade, India and China are expected to become increasingly major centres of the AIDS pandemic. It is, quite simply, disgraceful--and insulting--that the government of one of the richest countries in the world continues to avoid taking responsibility and leadership in this fight, and no amount of platitudes from Canadian Health Minister Tony Clement are going to negate that.

A couple of years ago, I thought I was going to volunteer somewhere in Africa with Canada World Youth. I'd been entranced by the idea of going to South Africa especially because of a movie my class had seen called The Power of One, an adaptation of an empowering book I also grew to love. I probably still exoticise the idea of going there from this moment with a choir in a prison from the movie, but it led to a book being handed to me by good family friends called Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton (and inscribed with only one word: 'Give'r!') This book has stayed with me ever since, somewhere in the back of my mind, humming, sighing, pushing me forward, and in this book about South Africa, written almost sixty years ago, one may find moments of greatness, sadness, and hope, that speak volumes about the need to take up the heavy burdens in our lives sometimes and do what is right.

The main character in the book is Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo, a man with a quiet life and family in his town of Ndotsheni, whose simple, if not easy, life is shaken by a letter calling him to Johannesburg to come to his sister Gertrude, who has left the village a number of years ago and not been heard from since. Arriving in the city, he is amazed and taken aback in equal parts by the appalling divisions of the society he is part of; visiting the black slums on the outskirts of the city, he sees the poverty and hardship the people there are living through, and wonders why it must be so. At home, he and his wife do not have such an easy time either, and as he departs for the city, Paton beautifully observes her parting with all of their savings to allow Stephen to search for Gertrude and their son in the city; 'she sat down at his table,' Paton writes, 'and put her head on it, and was silent, with the patient suffering of black women, with the suffering of oxen, with the suffering of any that are mute.'

If you were to look for those bearing one of the heaviest burdens of the HIV/AIDS crisis across Africa, where the pandemic is still taking its greatest toll, you would not be amiss to meet the grandmothers who are left to raise the families of their children who have succumbed to it. On the opening day of the Toronto conference this week, a meeting of 'Gogo' grannies was held to introduce grandmothers from Africa raising their children's children (many of whom have contracted HIV themselves from parents) to Canadian grandmothers trying to establish international bridges and systems of support for their African counterparts. This is a truly wonderful initiative, a perfect example of international solidarity and support raising awareness of a cause and making way for concrete change. But the AIDS crisis is so large, impacting so many people in so many ways, that it is still but a small step in a number of monumental ones that must be made if we are to fulfill the slogan chosen for this week's meeting of over 20 000 delegates: Time to Deliver. Each of these delegates represents but one person for every 1500 living with HIV today.

Cry, the Beloved Country was written in 1948, a year before the white South African government formalised the policy of apartheid it continued until in the 1990s, under heavy pressure from the international community to abandon it. In this book, Paton writes passionately that the thing that kept the spirit of apartheid most alive with whites in South Africa at the time was fear; fear of losing a priveleged place in society, fear of losing power. And yet this fear caused so much damage, wrought so much pain; this is mine, that is yours, I will keep to myself and you keep to yours, and you'd bloody well stay on your side of the line. What are we afraid of when we continue to defer truly confronting this pandemic until some distant point in the future, some other time, when it will almost certainly have only grown in proportion and killed millions more? Don't give me the Tony Clement line, that Canada is doing fine, that it's the rest of the international community that must step up to the plate. Not good enough. Canada is committing $800 million the global initiative to fight HIV/AIDS? Great. But how many billions more are needed to provide anti-retrovirals, for the food it must be taken with for those who have none, and for other medicines, and to pay nurses, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, police officers whose economies have been savaged by a disease that cuts across all sectors of society? And now our government has cancelled announcements of further commitments for the entire week of the conference. Where is our moral leadership now?

Of a loss of centre, a loss of place, among the young men and women we are met with in Johannesburg, Paton writes this:

Yes, there are a hundred, and a thousand voices crying. But what does one do, when one cries this thing, and one cries another? Who knows how we shall fashion a land of peace where black outnumbers white so greatly? Some say that the earth has bounty enough for all, and that more for one does not mean less for another, that the advance of one does not mean the decline of another. They say that poor-paid labour means a poor nation, and that better-paid labour means greater markets and greater scope for industry and manufacture, And others say that this is a danger, for better-paid labour will not only buy more but will also read more, think more, ask more, and will not be content to be forever voiceless and inferior.


Of course, what he speaks of is a predominantly black country living under overwhelmingly white rule, and the injustices therein. But there are voices not being heard now, as the AIDS crisis grows. Here in Canada over 60 000 people are living with HIV; last year, the global epidemic claimed more than 3.1 million lives, of whom more than half a million were children. Fields are being left with no one to tend them, schools with no one to teach, children with no parents to raise them. This is not just a health problem anymore, and I am extraordinarily proud of high-profile members of the fight against AIDS like UN Special Envoy for HIV and AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis and former US-president Bill Clinton for demanding lives be put before ideologies, that conditionalities on how money for HIV should be spent, such as on abstinence-only programs and not for sex workers, be scrapped. 'These conditionalities simply never work,' Lewis said yesterday. 'They are usually more destructive than they are in any way effective.'

Let us not fear to be bold, to take action, to put ourselves fully into this fight and to meet it head-on with the people living through it, for this is all of our crisis. Let our politicians put all the resources they can summon into this battle, and let the lives of the millions of people not afforded a spot on stage in Toronto beside Alicia Keys be not ruled by the whims of wealthy donors, though efforts like Bill Gates' are impressive and commendable, but let them instead be empowered to use all the resources we can gather collectively to build capacities and get the drugs they need and let us fight this thing together.

'There is a new thing happening here,' says Kumalo, of his village seeing a rebirth. 'It is not only these rains, though they too refresh the spirit. There is hope here, such as I have never seen before.' Let us carry this hope forward and show we can do more than hold press conferences and make empty promises. Let us be bold.

On another note, if you have been following events in Uganda, you may wonder why I have not written about the tentative peace talks underway between Museveni's government and the Lord's Resistance Army rebels, whose leader, Joseph Kony, has emerged from hiding for the first time in years to work out a deal. The answer is that I am simply waiting and seeing what becomes of this, I am hopeful it will lead to an end to the brutal violence in the region for the millions of people caught up in the war, but if the government keeps shooting rebel leaders and Kony and his troops are not held accountable for their atrocities... well, I am not certain what to think of all this. Write me! Let me know your thoughts on all these things.

Thank you for your patience, for your ears.

This week's photos of the International AIDS Conference were generously provided by Tanja-Tiziana Burdi, a Toronto-based photographer.


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posted by Christopher at 1:02 p.m.

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