Saturday, August 11, 2007

DEATH IN MAITENGWE

There are three to five deaths per week either from AIDS or old age. There are funerals every weekend and I am sorry to say that I have not attended a single one. We were warned about attending too many funerals for reasons of our resilience. It’s is easy to become jaded from attending funerals every week and not feeling like you’re making an impact. Most of the impact that volunteers make are not even seen till years and decades later.

Most people 15-49 years of age die from AIDS because they either did not get test and treatment or they defaulted from treatment. HIV/AIDS in a place like Botswana is difficult to personalize. If you live in a village like Maitengwe where 43% of people tested positive then it is in front of you, it is reality.

I have just realized one of my biggest discomforts with the world and that is the uneven distribution of wealth, poverty and disease. This have always bothered me and has been the driving force for wanting to serve the poor and work on public health projects in the developing world. It’s easy for us to see images of disease and poverty on the television and read about it in the newspapers in between the sitcoms commercials and expensive dinners and wine. The fact that we accept these social inequalities, disease and poverty is saying that their lives matter less than some others; and the idea that some lives matter less is the root cause of all that’s wrong with the world.

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