i will not eat the darkness

“My sister is six years old. There are no grown-ups living with us. I need a bathroom tap and clothes and shoes. And water also, inside the house. But especially, somebody to tuck me and my sister in at night." (Apiwe, age 13)

HIV work is full of stuff like this.

I could read headlines all day long.

HIV/AIDS Could 'Wipe Out' Lesotho, Official Says

My email inbox is stuffed with them.

HIV Infection as a Weapon of War

They're benumbing.

South Africa's AIDS Turmoil Continues

All the language speaks of pain.

Then you go outside, and you see that one of the people you work with is still not at work. Their teenage son leads you along a dirt path for 45 minutes. You find him sitting like a puppet without its strings, beneath the shade of a coconut tree. His wife is beside him, calm and steady, and their fat grandson is napping on a blanket. It's a setting both biting and beautiful. You realize the breeze wrapping around you all is sanctifying the dignity and intimacy of their long goodbye.

This person you work with is getting very, very thin. AIDS-thin.

"The son of AIDS activist Deli Hlongwa irons his clothes before attending her funeral. 

According to South Africa's MRC: 'Without significant changes in sexual behavior or interventions, about 15 percent of all children under the age of 15 are expected to be orphaned by 2015.'"

(When you submerse yourself in this type of thing, to be honest, it all starts to mean very, very little.)

And so it is so easy to believe that is it. That's AIDS in Africa. It's despair and death and children crying. They are alone and it doesn't stop.

That's not the whole truth though. There is a whole other side too. There's only going on if you've seen the rest of it. I want to show you that too.

It looks like this:

This is footage from the AIDS Indaba I attended in Swaziland last June. I never talked about it here,  but that week affected me very much. 

Imagine 35 people congregated high up on Swazi mountain. Four are young white Western women; all the rest are Africans, a festival of nationalities and languages, mostly women and all working as home-care volunteers in their hometowns. What that really means is that these are normal, hardworking mothers and grandmothers, they've probably never left their country before, and they've been cleaning up diarrhea, cooking porridge, sitting for hours and hours in sparse government health clinics, and singing out prayers over their sick HIV-positive neighbors, without compensation, for years. I'm not trying to make them oversimplified heroes but - would you do that? They are heroes.

That week was one of the most fun in my life. We talked about the discouragements. We ate hefty African meals of rice and tea and chicken. We stood tall, calling out Scripture, raising our voices, waving our arms. But mostly, we just sang and danced.

And danced. And danced. The conference theme was "Care for the Caregiver". What that meant for these African men and women was coming together, grasping hands, and stomping their feet in choreography always changing, from the heart, gloriously African. 

The clip here is from the first morning when people were still a bit shy. By the afternoon, anytime there was a lull in the program, someone would sneak away from the tables and really get things hopping. To the beats of siSwati or English or Zulu gospel music, a circle of (to use Alexander McCall Smith's words) "traditionally built women" would form, these long-suffering mothers, and we'd all start jumping and shaking and I've rarely heard so much laughter. This is not how Americans would plan a self-care retreat, not in a million years, but it was clearly exactly what they needed. Because in the end, after all the good food, good friends, good words, they'd all of them be going back to no resources and even more sick people. They needed all the strength of heart they could muster in order to carry on.

It was clear as day they found it.

HIV/AIDS in southern Africa also looks like these:

Pictures of one of our partners, AACO - translated as "Association of Help for Orphaned Children" - doing their thing, their small, small thing, just plugging along.

I love this kid so much. I think I sort of instantly fell in love with him. It's not so easy to see in the picture, but he's got a bum left eye. It's bad - face to face, it looks like he lost his eye completely but then somebody shoved a too-small cloudy marble in instead as a fake eye. That's not the case, its all his real eye, diseased, maybe with a cataract, I don't know. He's small - about four - and he's dirty and you can't touch him enough, he's so gentle, he'll stroke your arm all day if you let him. I don't know why, but despite everything, he's the most hopeful thing in the world to me. I loved this kid.

But what's even better is that Sara and I are going to try to get him help. One of the Anglican priests Sara works with is an actual ophthalmologist.

A rural Anglican church...

...in one of the communities where Sara works. I got to come along and join in.

Emthonjeni, one of our projects in South Africa. It is just amazing.

Baylor Children's Clinic, Swaziland. Read: American standard of medicine, free for dying children.

There is so much hope in the world. It's so easy to forget. 

But mystery is, yet.

We have not been forsaken.