summer reading

last night, i finally started a book loaned to me by a lady at church called there's no me without you. if you are interested in learning more about ethiopia and the AIDS and poverty crisis there, i would highly recommend this book. the author is a journalist and mother of five kids (4 biological, 3 adopted) who travels to ethiopia after reading a ny times article about the millions of children left orphaned by AIDS. she meets a woman named haregewoin who has become well-known in addis ababa for opening her home to orphans, and the book tells the story of haregewoin and the children she saves. one review called this story "the schindler's list of our time." the author is an incredible writer, but what is most striking about the book is that it is so real. it will make you acutely aware of the pain and suffering that so many in our world face, and it will ask you to consider what you are willing to do about it. the book is so good that only after reading 30 pages last night, i quickly got on amazon and purchased copies for my parents, inlaws, and an audio copy for jamie so that he doesn't have to hear me say "oh, let me read you this part!" every 30 seconds while i'm reading to myself.

let me share a few of the statistics she quotes:

81 percent of ethiopia's people live on less than $2 a day.
26 percent of ethiopia's people live on less than $1 a day
20 percent of ethiopia's 65 million people can't afford to eat even once a day.
in 2002, ethiopia's spending on health care, per person, per year was $2.
in 2000, 11 percent of ethiopia's children were orphans.
between 2000 and 2020, 68 million people in africa are expected to die of AIDS.
by 2010, between 25 million and 50 million children in africa (from newborn to age 15) will be orphans.
in 2006, 4.7 million people in africa were in immediate need of lifesaving AIDS drugs, but only 500,000 had access to them.
a child dies of AIDS or is orphaned by AIDS every 20 minutes.

and she writes:

"presumably you can make a variety of calculations and graphs with numbers like eleven million and twenty-five million, but hats off to anyone who can begin to imagine what this really looks like, what this means. who was going to raise twelve million children? that's what i suddenly wanted to know .... the numbers wash over most of us. this is happening in our time? we, who have read the histories of the armenian genocide and of the holocaust and of stalin's gulag, who have lived in the epoch of the killings in cambodia, bosnia, and rwanda, find ourselves once again safely tucked away. we may feel a vague sad tug of common cause with human misery on the far side of the tropic of cancer, but we are disconnected from it by a thousand degrees of space and time. this is true even in the hardest-hit countries, because even in the highest-prevalence countries of asia and africa, there are comfortable citizens -- including elected leaders -- keeping their hemlines above the rising waters."

it's funny to me how God brings to my mind things i said in the past that were just clearly stupid. i can remember saying one time that i just didn't have the same passionate calling to africa that other christians do and didn't think i ever would. and i also said one time that i wouldn't go to africa until i was ready to die (that statement was really ignorance and selfishness at their best). and yet here i am, devastated by africa. and i continue to grapple with questions about what my life is supposed to look like knowing what i know about africa. the thing is, just because i go without buying a new shirt or eating dinner out doesn't automatically mean things get better in africa. but it's the pattern of my life that i'm concerned about. do my actions continually reflect a care for myself or for others? do i live with the groaning, suffering world in my mind or with my own comfort in mind?

i don't know how to make things better in africa. even as jamie and i anticipate rescuing one child from the devastation, i know that won't keep many more children from losing their parents to AIDS or poverty. we must adopt because there are children who have already lost parents, but i have to wonder what can be done on a larger scale to ensure that parents do not continue to die. i realize that i am not saying anything original, i am only verbalizing for myself the battle so many western christians have with trying to negotiate their mostly easy, comfortable lives with what is going on in africa. how can we change the fact that the world trade organization, with the backing of the united states, has placed intellectual property rights on the composition of anti-AIDS medicines, making getting those medicines nearly impossible for people in africa since they can't afford to buy the rights to make the medicines themselves? i don't have the answers about what we can do to prevent such injustice and suffering, but i am reminded of God's words, spoken through isaiah:

"woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless" (chapter 10, vv. 1, 2).