austraLasia
1494
Choose Life!
A perspective on HIV/AIDS
(A 'toward #1500' entry -
also from Melanesia)
HONIARA: 18th March 2006 -- Bishop
Kevin Dowling CssR has been touring Melanesia with a simple message: "Choose
Life - and do all we can to help others choose life!", his closing words at the
Eucharistic celebration at Holy Cross Cathedral, Honiara this week. Bishop
Dowling had just come from Papua New Guinea where he also spoke on the subject
of HIV/AIDS. Bishop Dowling is Bishop of Rustenburg, the site of the world's
largest platinum mines in North West South Africa - but also some of the worst
squatter settlements in the nation, where HIV/AIDS is rife at 47.2% of the local
population. He set up the Bishops' National AIDS Office which runs programs
hardest hit in the five most worst affected nations in
Africa.
The HIV and AIDS pandemic throughout the world is
affecting every aspect of life today - individuals, families (especially),
communities and societies, Bishop Dowling said. It is seriously impacting
the economies of countries by taking skilled workers out of the market - sick,
dying, unable to work. it even threatens the survival of some small
societies or nations, e.g. Swaziland and Botswana - and Solomon Islands is a
small nation of fewer than 500,000 people.
Bishop Dowling
soon warmed to his real message, which was not one of scary statistics, but that
people in societies such as in Melanesia are "religious" - the spiritual
dimension is part of them, and can be built on. Churches and Faith communities
can have a positive or negative effect on people by way of the attitudes and
beliefs they build up in people and communities concerning HIV infection. "Our
goal should be to enable people to affirm 'I am not this cancer of the
bone...leukaemia...HIV positive...I am a person'. As a person I am not
separate from the beauty of nature, animals, all forms of life. Everything
is interconnected. Spiritual or being spiritual means regarding everything
as sacred, and a way to transform myself/ourselves from within. It is a
journey to awareness of God, a higher power, in me; to inner stillness, meaning,
the ability to live in the now, to be present to myself and to
God".
The bishop recognized that those who are dying of
AIDS need accompaniment, and that people who share this aspect of those
individuals' 'now' are crucial to positive, life-giving acceptance, to letting
go of the past and the fear of the future. Bishop Dowling likened the opposite
attitude - rejection - as akin to apartheid. The one discriminated on the
basis of colour or race, the other discriminates on the basis of disease.
The proper message is "God loves you and accepts you as you are. No matter
what has happened in your life God loves and forgives. God will never
reject you - we will not either".
In 2005, some 8.3
million people were living with HIV in Asia, including 1.1 million people who
became newly infected in the past year. AIDS claimed some 520,000 lives in
2005. An estimated 74,000 people in Oceania are living with HIV. Although
less than 4,000 people are believed to have died of AIDS in 2005, about 8,200
are thought to have become newly infected with HIV. Among young people
15–24 years of age, an estimated 1.2% of women and 0.4% of men were living with
HIV in 2005.
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