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I have never known a world without AIDS.

On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the first official report of what was later named AIDS. I was not yet a year old.

I was in preschool when researchers in France and the United States isolated HIV as the cause of AIDS; it was 1984.

Only a year later, in 1985, at least one AIDS case had been reported in every region of the world.

Photo courtesy of Maryn Olson

It wasn't much longer —-1987— until the U.S. government added HIV to the list of “dangerous contagious diseases” that would bar someone from immigrating or even visiting the U.S. And this was the same year that AZT, the first effective drug for the treatment of AIDS, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

I am part of the first AIDS generation. For us, a red ribbon has always symbolized AIDS awareness, and universal precautions are second nature.

But we are the ones who are dying.

Today, young people between the ages of 15 and 24 account for nearly half of new adult HIV infections in the world. Worldwide, most of the young people living with HIV/AIDS are female (62 percent). In sub-Saharan Africa, girls and young women make up 76 percent of the young people with HIV/AIDS, according the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

Since November 2003, part of my work in Lutheran churches in southern Africa has involved people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS, first in Soweto and currently in northern Namibia. Over and over, I have seen first-hand the devastation this epidemic is causing — in families, communities, and whole societies.

We can talk about the numbers, spouting statistics until we're blue in the face. And while I do believe it is important to understand the big picture of the AIDS epidemic with statistics, maps, and even expert opinions at times, what has become vividly clear to me through my work are the faces. AIDS affects real people.

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Faith Reflections by the Rev. Kaari Reierson

Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. James 5: 13 – 15

I have a friend who was diagnosed recently with AIDS. It took a long, long time for our medical system to figure it out. Perhaps they didn’t guess for so long because in the minds of the doctors, he didn’t fit the profile in the United States — he had emigrated from Africa. But in Africa, everybody fits the profile.

It’s an incredibly sad story. His family is not here to mourn with him or to comfort him or to tend him in his illness. He had to advise his American ex-wife to get tested. She doesn’t have health insurance. She also bears the burden of a lot of extended family who depend on her financial support.

What makes the story even more agonizing, to me, is how few people he was able to tell about his diagnosis. He told a few of his closest confidantes, but his coworkers think he has an intestinal ailment. Ironically,
I think his coworkers would be far less shocked and far more supportive than he could anticipate.

Perhaps in time he will find that he has to tell people. Certainly as he begins treatment he will need support and understanding.

It’s pretty difficult to manage AIDS in secret. Perhaps once he does he will find more welcome among his coworkers than he would have thought possible. But for right now, he suffers mostly alone, working to hide the medical diagnosis with a series of pretenses. He is being driven and controlled by shame to shut out the very people who could offer comfort.

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