Monday, July 10, 2000
Church breaks silence on AIDS
AME leaders struggling to stem crisis in Africa
By Mark Curnutte
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Tracy Mudede of Botswana talks with Rev. Jose Luis Sevene, a pastor from Mozambique, about the AIDS epidemic Saturday during the AME convention.
(Tony Jones photo)
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In Tracy Mudede's homeland of Botswana, 1 in 4 people is HIV-positive and life expectancy will decline another 10 years by 2006.
“We have 290 AIDS orphans in one rural village,” Mrs. Mudede, director of a new AIDS center in Lobatse, said Friday at the Albert B. Sabin Cincinnati Convention Center. She is one of 20,000 people attending the 46th General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
“We are taking care of six children whose mother died. She gave them to her brother, but he left,” she said. “The problem is overwhelming.”
It's into this darkness that the AME Church is shining a light of faith.
As the oldest black denomination in the United States, with congregations in southern Africa and the Caribbean, the AME Church is expected this week to expand its AIDS awareness program and attack insensitivity to the disease here and abroad.
The AME Church, many of its leaders say, is trying to break the silence that has characterized black church response to the AIDS epidemic that has afflicted people of color worldwide.
AIDS has taken more than 13 million lives in sub-Saharan Africa. Seventy percent of the estimated 34 million people infected with the virus worldwide live there, the United Nations estimates. Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to nearly all the world's 11 million AIDS orphans.
In the United States, where African-Americans are 13 percent of the population, blacks account for half of all AIDS cases, a rate expected to reach 60 percent by 2005.
In the southern African nations of Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and Botswana — which make up the AME Church's 18th Episcopal District — addressing AIDS requires more money to comfort the dying, care for their orphans and create jobs to steer girls and boys from prostitution to support their families.
“We should use any means necessary,” said Bishop William DeVeaux, president of the AME's Council of Bishops since 1996 and presiding bishop of the 18th district in Africa. “We begin with a commitment to abstinence but strongly support other means to control the spread of the disease, including safe sex, the use of condoms.
“If we don't do something, most of the other issues facing the church will be of little consequence.”
Methodist denominations — including the AME — do not share Catholicism's objection to artificial contraception, so there is no doctrinal contradiction in advocating condoms.
It was the Arizona-born Bishop DeVeaux, a former U.S. military chaplain in Vietnam, who called on AME congregations, clergy and laity to address AIDS in their communities and throughout the world.
Bishop DeVeaux had a willing program partner in his wife, Pam DeVeaux, a former college professor and administrator from Delaware.
She helped to secure donations from the United States, particularly from the AME Church's home district — New England — to build the AIDS center in Lobatse, Botswana, that Mrs. Mudede directs.
That facility, the M. Joan Cousin Women's Empowerment Center, named for an AME official in the denomination's New England district, opened in April.
It has a large meeting hall, kitchen and offices, and has attracted commitments from Habitat for Humanity to build 50 cottages to house AIDS orphans.
Plans also include the addition of a child-care center and a medical clinic.
“The big problem in Africa is that people — beginning as young as 11, 12 and 13 — sell their bodies for sex to support their parents and families,” Dr. Pam DeVeaux said. “Women stay in relationships with men who are HIV-positive from having contact with prostitutes.”
The average family in Botswana, a country of 150,000, earns $40 a month.
“We are nurturing people with HIV and full-blown AIDS, and we are trying to show young women, especially, that they have options other than prostitution,” she said. “We are teaching literacy, job skills.”
In addition, the denomination wants to establish a message of “sacred” sex, not just “safe” sex. People need to be introduced to Scripture that teaches the human body is a temple, program officials say.
Through the AME Church's Women's Missionary Society, AME members in the United States are getting involved in the effort to combat AIDS in Africa.
“This is my project now,” said B.J. Primus Cotton, wife of a Chicago AME pastor. A nurse educator, she visited Botswana and told other Chicago church members about the AIDS epidemic.
“Now, our local missionary society in Chicago is adopting the six orphaned children (in Africa),” she said. “People want to give when they know exactly where the money is going.”
The denomination is exploring ways to expand its program into other nations in southern Africa — including Mozambique.
The Rev. Jose Luis Sevene is an AME pastor in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where recent floods ravaged much of the land and the average family earns about $20 a month.
“There is a connection between poverty and AIDS,” the Rev. Mr. Sevene said. “There are condoms everywhere. But when someone offers you money for sex and says they don't want to use the condom, you don't use it.”
AMEs also will try to stock African hospitals and clinics, where blood now given in transfusions is untested for HIV and instruments are not sterile. AME officials want to establish widespread AIDS testing, so people who do not have the virus will take precautions to maintain good health.
“To come out of this, we need people to come to us from the outside and help us to build factories, so our people can work,” the Rev. Mr. Sevene said. “We need schools for our people. That is how we can have some guarantee of a better future, not just something for today that is gone tomorrow.”
Founded in 1787 in Philadelphia, the AME Church has about 2.5 million members and more than 8,000 churches in the United States, the Caribbean and Africa.
“The church has to be the angels who stop this scourge. It's satanic,” Dr. DeVeaux said. “We don't have to throw our hands up in despair. We are to do what Jesus did — care for the downtrodden.”
Church breaks silence on AIDS
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