was orphaned by a raging hiv/aids epidemic that to this day is ravaging many communities in Africa. The likelihood is great that baby Linda is hiv-positive too. We don't know. I saw villages and communities so hard hit by this sweeping epidemic that literally hundreds of orphaned and homeless children are wandering the streets of a small town by day, foraging and begging for scraps of food, sniffing glue to assuage the pain of slow starvation, sleeping huddled by the dozens in the public square at night, sharing only their body heat against the cold.
In many towns I visited, I walked the streets hearing the patter of hammers swinging like in an American suburb during a building boom. Except these carpenters were building coffins, by the thousands. The accapella singing I heard wafting around the village streets, in town after town, were the funeral durges of endless wakes and burial ceremonies, day after day after week after month. It's impossible to describe the reality and the magnitude of what is happening in urban and rural Africa as a result of this horrible disease, and I will never be the same as a result of these experiences.
Like in many American communities and small towns, there are very strong political and social forces that make the discussion of safer sex practices, i.e. condom use, a subject that is discouraged if not forbidden from public discourse.
With the work of thousands of younger African community activists, many of high school and middle school age, in many cases with no resources whatsoever to work with, organizations are forming to educate and inform the population at large about aids prevention. Through the kids' presentations of singing, dancing and drama, and with an unfathomable level of heroism and courage, young school age children are carrying the future of their society on their backs as they try hard to create change in their communities and government.
Young African organizers struggle literally to save themselves and their families from the advances of a disease that has already for years been as bad or worse than the bubonic plague.
