Ted Karpf on a Mission to Fight AIDS in Africa
Episcopal News Service. August 24, 2001 [2001-227S]
Dan England, Director of Communications for the Episcopal Church
(ENS) Ted Karpf is a man with a mission--to mobilize the church in the battle against the AIDS pandemic. After years on the frontlines of the struggle in the United States, his mission has now taken him to South Africa, where he has put together the first AIDS conference for Anglican churches south of the Sahara. In the short time he has been in South Africa, he has been deeply shaken by the dimensions of the issue and the high human costs.
A few days before the conference, Karpf described a visit to an old African priest who had just completed his 500th funeral, how he had been to a so-called hospital where he had been ushered into a room for women with AIDS designed to care for 20 patients, but now treating 70 or 80, most of them succumbing to tuberculosis brought on by the fetid conditions. The women, many of them with children in their arms, stared back at him.
This same hospital had hearses, he told me, that were actually pick-up trucks lined up like so many limousines on Oscar night. They were waiting for the AIDS victims inside, many cut off from their families and communities and now stigmatized by everyone, utterly alone and left to die.
As Karpf spoke in a quiet cadence, his voice cracked and a tear appeared on his cheek. He described a four-year-old orphan who was struggling for life and an old man of 80 who hungered for a scrap of dignity. In short, he told me about Africa and AIDS, and in those few minutes I understood that this conference was no mere gathering of the great and the good to talk, but a sort of war council that hoped to outline a strategy to deal with issues of life or death. However late the church's response to the crisis, that response had to be powerful and decisive. But most of all, in that moment, I saw a man who had been touched and moved and changed by a disease that is either dismissed as belonging to that group over there or, in the case of Africa, hardly discussed at all.
An unlikely journey
Ted Karpf's journey to this moment has been unlikely. True, he's had plenty of experience with AIDS in Dallas, where as rector of St. Thomas the Apostle he buried 150 AIDS victims in the course of his time there. From there, Karpf served as head of the National Episcopal AIDS Coalition (NEAC), promoting the slogan that "The Episcopal Church has AIDS." And he has concluded that the Anglican churches in Africa are facing a monumental task in addressing the issue in the face of the most chilling statistics on earth--36 million with HIV/AIDS; 27 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa alone.
Karpf approached Archbishop Njongokulu Ndungane, primate of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (CPSA), to offer his help. Like many of his colleagues, the archbishop had been distracted from dealing with the AIDS issue because of apartheid (for which troubles he'd been jailed for three years) and then with the issue of debt in the Two-Thirds World. But finally he was ready, and called Karpf, who was serving on the diocesan staff in Washington, to meet him in New York to work out what could be done. "I have a relative's funeral tonight," Karpf told him. "That's fine," said Ndungane, a man not used to being refused. "Just be in New York by eight tomorrow. Goodbye."
So at the Episcopal Church Center early the next morning, Karpf and the archbishop began their negotiations and planning. By 5 o'clock that night, Karpf was appointed Provincial Canon Missioner for HIV/AIDS. Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD) pledged $50,000 towards a strategic planning process for tackling the HIV/AIDS problem, an amount eventually supplemented by a grant from Agency for International Development. A few weeks later, Karpf was in Africa.
'A huge opportunity'
Ndungane wanted a conference in August. It was now June. But remarkably and without much hesitation, every province of Africa agreed to send a representative to conference, the first such coming together of the Anglican church in Africa about any subject, ever. And it worked out a deep commitment of the churches, endorsed by every primate in Africa, bolstered by the decision to establish a staff position to coordinate the response. The churches promised sustained action in every province, heeding the call by Ndungane that every country in Africa declare AIDS a national emergency. The Deputy President of South Africa pledged a full partnership with the church, a pledge echoed by an immediate endorsement by the wife of Nelson Mandela, lending the effort additional moral authority.
As pleased as he was with the response, Karpf kept talking again about the people who would be most directly affected. "So many of them die alone," he said. "The stigma is more killing than the virus-- to be cut off like that. But the church can be there, Christians can be there. We have a huge opportunity."