AIDS has a woman's face

Seven years ago the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan declared that AIDS in Africa had 'a woman's face' because while, globally the number of women infected with HIV amounted to 50 percent, the figure in Africa had reached 58 percent.

Now, the World Health Organisation's first global study of  the health of women between the ages of 14 and 44 has shown that the AIDS virus is the leading cause of death and disease among women in that age group. According to the UN agency, one in five deaths among women throughout the world in this age group is linked to unsafe sex.

Education remains the key.  This is as much the case in the 'developed' countries such as Australia -- where teenage abortions are again grabbing national headlines amid further calls for a national, comprehensive sexual education program --  as it is among teenage girls in the poverty stricken and undeveloped nations where the rights of women are either denied or ignored.  It's particularly noteworthy that the mother of the second Malawian orphan recently adopted by the superstar Madonna died in childbirth at the age of just  14.

Our own organisation's steps are obviously tiny, but they include providing on-site accommodation for girls at schools we've built in rural Malawi. These schools are helping educate hundreds of AIDS orphans, children with HIV, and girls who would otherwise become domestic workhorses and drift into teenage marriage because few care about their need for a secondary education. On-site accommodation is providing one answer to absenteeism.

We've just built a girls boarding facility to accommodate 65 girls at our Australian Secondary School at Kambona in southern Malawi and a similar facility for 50 girls which will be operational before Christmas at our Australian Secondary School at Nogwe, which the locals have dubbed "The Australian Progressive Academy"!

The Kambona  secondary school caters for more than 300 teenagers. The Nogwe secondary school has 415 students, 230 of them girls, and including some 120 AIDS orphans. Five students there have HIV. At the neighbouring Australian Primary School (which we also funded) there are 654 pupils -  including 370 girls, 104 AIDS orphans and 14 HIV positive children.

The establishment of The Australian AIDS Fund was inspired by the bravery and courage of Eve van Grafhorst, the first Australian girl to be infected by HIV through a blood transfusion. She and her family were reviled and ostracised and virtually chased out of Australia in the mid 1980s because of the fear and hysteria that then surrounded HIV/AIDS.  She died in New Zealand, where the family found sanctuary, as an 11 year old in 1993.  Our website carries her story.

Some historians argue that Africa is the site of the Garden of Eden and, thus, the birthplace of the first  Eve. This gives our organisation further encouragement as we seek especially to console the AIDS -stricken faces of her descendants there.

Most recently, I learned that one of the Christian church ministers we work with in Africa had contracted HIV, and that his wife was also infected. It came as a great shock to him and his family. 

It reminded me of a situation more than 20 years ago when a religious community of women in Australia also suddenly learned that its chaplain was similarly infected and we were able to help them and his community with information in the same way that we're now helping our African friends. 

It makes the unavoidable point that the Body of Christ is indeed infected with HIV/AIDS.

The girls boarding hostel at The Australian Secondary School funded by the Australian AIDS Fund at Kambona in rural southern Malawi.

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