Send your love

Siteki, Swaziland

16/04/09

Our world is in need.

Every day I walk into little homesteads bereft of food, proper shelter, clothing.

I see little faces with dried tears upon their faces, mothers whose breast milk is running dry because they have not enough to eat. Young men just like me drowning in disease and despair.

Yesterday while making our visits, I was taken to the homestead of a young man. He was 29 years old, the age I will turn in just over a month.

He was lying on a woven mat outside his house, shivering...

A severe fungal infection had overtaken his scalp. Wart virus had erupted across face. His body was covered in black Kaposi' sarcoma. He could not swallow because of candida infection in his throat. He was in what we describe as stage IV HIV. Terminal AIDS. His immune system shutting down, allowing every opportunistic infection imaginable to take over his young body.

Severely dehydrated. Starved to the point of death. I took his hand in mine and in his eyes, saw my own reflection.

Were we that different, He and I?

Should we both not have the right to live in a country free of disease? To be educated. To have food. To hitch our dreams to a distant star and follow them with the knowledge that all things are possible.

How could i have lived my life of complacency and excess and forgetten this brother whom I never knew, dying in another corner of the world. Our world.

After examining him, I stopped to peel him an orange. He sucked the juice from each little quarter.

I asked the nurses to say a prayer. To sing a song for him.

In wild harmonies a little family sang a plaintiff prayer for their son.

I hung my head and could not hide my tears.

We sent him to hospital for intravenous rehydration, but knew that what this man needed was another chance. Another life. A world where people cared about more than their own bordered existence.

A world where the splinter was removed from human minds which caused them to mistake distance for immediacy.

So my friend, whomever you are, whereever you are.... Send your love.

Tie it to a kite string. Breathe it in fragrant prayers into the open sky.

Send it in food and clothing, in rice and shoes and heartfelt wishes.

Stand in the face of the nay-sayer, the pessimist, the cynic and declare the world one nation. One home. One dream.

Yes, our brothers and sisters are dying.

So why waste our lives in tears, or worse, in denial of the truth.

Pick up your broom. Your pen. Your own wounded hands...

And send your love,

From Siteki with Love, M