Anglicans Asked to Give Priority to AIDS
Episcopal News Service. February 2, 1993 [93016]
As late as the 1988 Lambeth Conference, bishops from Africa were denying that there was a disease called AIDS.
"Even myself, I was one of those," said the Most Rev. Yona Okoth, archbishop of Uganda. "I did not know that this disease existed in Uganda."
Now, Archbishop Okoth took the lead in urging the worldwide Anglican Communion to make the international crisis a major priority. In a resolution passed at the joint conference of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) and the Anglican Communion's primates, meeting in Cape Town for two weeks in January, others joined him in calling for a universal response to AIDS.
The resolution urged "all governments, all churches, all religious bodies to do all in their power to fight this killer of our people." The resolution also endorsed "the work of HIV/AIDS education and prevention throughout the Anglican Communion both locally and internationally." The resolution chided governments that are not willing to admit the extent of the disease's inroads in their countries. "We urge them to disclose the facts regarding HIV/AIDS in their respective countries as a first step towards developing the measures and means necessary to deal with this disease," the resolution stated.
The scale of the epidemic finally wore away denial of the disease, Archbishop Okoth said. On his return from Lambeth, he said, "we started noticing people dying. AIDS is all over Africa, and it is a very bad."
The Ugandan program of education and prevention, which was developed as an international partnership with the Episcopal Church (USA), the United States Agency for International Development and agencies of the United Nations, was endorsed by the resolution in particular as a model for the rest of the church. (See October 1, 1992, ENS.)
"We note with great joy and gratitude the expressed willingness of the Church of Uganda to respond to requests from other provinces for technical assistance in developing programs," the resolution stated.
In Uganda, as in other African countries, the disease has had a devastating impact, but the Anglican Church, with six million members -- about one third of the population -- has been able to push for new attitudes towards AIDS.
"They call it the 'slim' disease," said the Rev. John Lathrop, executive secretary of the Church Commissioners for the Province of the Church of Uganda. In 1992, according to Lathrop, 32 percent of all adults tested in the capital of Kampala were positive for HIV. And according to figures released in January 1993, almost 32 percent of the young women between the ages of 15 and 19 who were tested in greater Kampala were HIV-infected.
"At Makerere University (the country's largest university), the newest job is that of coffin-maker to serve the student body," Lathrop said. "I don't know of any priest in Uganda who doesn't have a close relative who has died of AIDS."
"They don't talk about sexuality in Uganda, at least not in the old days, so this was a major breakthrough," Lathrop said in describing a major AIDS conference held in August 1991. "It galvanized the Church in Uganda."
"It was the first time we talked about sex," agreed Archbishop Okoth. "It was the first time we talked about condoms. It was not easy, but the fact was that our clergy were tired of burying the dead from this disease. So we opened our heart and said we needed to know more about this."
"The formal moral shame that people were concerned about has been getting washed away," Lathrop added. "The denial was beginning to erode away. They saw it wasn't just a health problem or a moral problem, but a problem affecting society."
"We think the only thing is to have self-control, and to make people aware of this disease -- how we get it, how we prevent it, and that there's no cure," Archbishop Okoth said.
The result of the Mukono conference was the provincial AIDS education and prevention program based on international partnerships, Lathrop said.
Early surveys showed that "over 60 percent of the people who lived in the rural areas of Uganda did not understand what AIDS was, what caused it, and how to prevent it," Lathrop observed.
Thanks in large part to the project, that figure is down to under 50 percent, but still, Lathrop said, "less than 2 percent understand that AIDS could be translated from the mother to a child through pregnancy and birth."
One survey found that 38 percent of the children were HIV-positive, with the expectancy of life not past the age of five, and for most, not past the age of two. "They all die horrible deaths," Lathrop said.
A National Day of Fasting and Prayer and an AIDS Awareness Month have bolstered the education efforts, as well as three-day AIDS awareness conferences held for diocesan clergy and laity.
Education has had to be followed up with behavior modification, Lathrop said, admitting that "changing a person's sexual behavior is one of the more difficult tasks."
In the initial five dioceses (out of 23 in the province) selected for the program, 100 educators will be trained. In turn, they will train an additional 10,000 "peer trainers," according to Lathrop. "The first goal is to impact 750,000 people in the five dioceses in two years," he said.
A third thrust is support of the estimated 1.2 million orphans in the country, an estimated 200,000 of them described as "AIDS orphans." "That number is expected to reach a million by the end of the century."
The program also is trying to attach orphans to another group with great needs, the elderly abandoned because of the deaths of their children. "By supporting children, we support the elderly, and give the elderly a reason to live," Lathrop said. The project also works to bring in medical supplies, including condoms.
Lathrop suggested that "maybe the time has come for the Anglican Communion to develop an international Anglican agency whose principle focus at the moment would be the world AIDS problem." The agency could then branch out to "other problems of international dimension," he said.