WASHINGTON (ABP) — Sharing Christ with people who are dying of AIDS, drowning in poverty and going to bed hungry requires addressing all of those problems simultaneously, according to officials of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
That's why this year's CBF general assembly meeting in Atlanta will be preceded by a two-day summit focusing on ways to combat the international epidemic of AIDS and the virus that causes it, HIV. The convocation, dubbed “Breaking the Silence: Compassion for an HIV Positive World,” is scheduled for June 21-22. According to promotional materials, it will provide missionaries, ministers and laypeople “an opportunity to formulate a personal, church and Fellowship-wide response to this global health crisis.”
The United Nations estimates that more than 40 million people are infected with HIV worldwide, and more than 25 million have already died of AIDS since it first surfaced 25 years ago. Of those currently living with the virus, 95 percent are in developing countries. The large majority of those are in Africa, although HIV is also spreading quickly in the Caribbean and parts of Asia.
But sub-Saharan Africa has borne the brunt of the AIDS crisis, with an estimated 6,300 people dying from AIDS and another 8,500 becoming infected with HIV every day. In some of the hardest-hit areas, more than 40 percent of all adults are infected, and AIDS orphans often experience the deaths of both parents as well as their secondary caregivers.
John Derrick, an associate global missions coordinator for CBF, said officials decided to hold the summit “to make our constituency more aware” of the prevalence of the disease in areas where many CBF missionaries serve. He also said CBF officials hope to use the meeting as a catalyst “to form a more coordinated response as Baptists” to the AIDS crisis.
That includes dealing with the disease and the virus that causes it in relation to the social conditions that have encouraged its spread.
“I think the most important thing to think about with HIV/AIDS is specifically that we are not going to win that battle if we look at it as a health issue — it really is a development issue,” said Erin Tunney, the senior international policy analyst for Bread for the World. The Washington-based anti-poverty group has historically worked with mainline Protestant churches and recently became a CBF partner organization. The group's head, David Beckmann, will be the summit's featured speaker.
Tunney said AIDS, hunger and poverty go hand-in-hand. For instance, the small fraction of infected Africans fortunate enough to receive drugs (known as anti-retrovirals) to combat the virus respond better to the treatments if they are properly fed. “There are lots of studies out there that will show you that when people are properly fed and have proper nourishment, they have a much better response to treatment,” she said.
But the high rates of AIDS in many agricultural parts of Africa have rendered millions of farmers, hunters and cooks unable to work, exacerbating existing food shortages.
“If you have a community that has a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS, you completely undermine the workforce. And in an agrarian society like much of Africa, that's devastating,” Tunney said. “You no longer have people to grow that food, because they're sick.”
The problem also persists in cities — because workers disabled by the disease cannot earn the money it takes to buy food.
Because of that, the summit will focus on ways to combat the AIDS crisis personally, locally and globally. That will include advice on lobbying government entities to provide more funding to organizations that combine programs combating AIDS with those focused on economic development.
“The power of the purse lays in Congress, so people in churches need to let their members of Congress, their elected officials know that these are issues they care about,” Tunney said. One way her group does that is through its annual “Offering of Letters,” in which members of local congregations send letters to government officials encouraging poverty-focused development assistance for Third World countries.
“An elected official…in my opinion is not really looking for experts — they want to know what their constituents care about,” Tunney said.
The summit will also focus on the connection between HIV infection and poverty in the United States, where infection rates have begun rising at alarming rates in many poor and marginalized communities. Derrick and Tunney both noted that social ills that plague impoverished American communities — intravenous drug use, prostitution — also encourage the spread of HIV.
“Particularly for impoverished areas, people do put themselves at risk and [poverty] leads to riskier behavior that causes HIV/AIDS,” Tunney said. “That spiral is the same whether you live in Detroit or you live in Ghana.”
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