Primer #1: A long post....

....but worth the time.

In 2000, when Melissa Fay Greene began to learn about the plight of Africa, there were 12 million AIDS orphans living there. She read how the UN described Africa as a "continent of orphans."

From Melissa Fay Greene:

By 2010, between twenty-five million and fifty million African children, from newborn to age fifteen, would be orphans......Human beings are not wired to absorb twelve million or eighteen million or twenty-five million bits of information; our protohuman ancestors never had to contemplate more than about ten or twenty of anything......Twelve million orphans today. Twenty-five million orphans tomorrow. And those were just the numbers of AIDS orphans; if you added in the orphans from malaria and TB, you hit thirty-six million sub-Saharan orphans, and those numbers didn't include children deprived of the adults in their lives by war and famine.

Who was going to raise twelve million children? That's what I suddenly wanted to know. There are days that Donny and I thought we'd be driven insane by five children. Who was teaching twelve million children how to swim? Who was signing twelve million permission slips for school field trips? Who packed twelve million school lunches? Who cheered at twelve million soccer games? (That sounded like our weekends.) Who was going to buy twelve million pairs of sneakers that light up when you jump? Backpacks? Toothbrushes? Twelve million pairs of socks? Who will tell twelve million bedtime stories? Who will quiz twelve million children on Thursday nights for their Friday-morning spelling tests? Twelve million trips to the dentist? Twelve million birthday parties?

Who will wake in the night in response to eighteen million nightmares? Who will offer grief counseling to twelve, fifteen, eighteen, thirty-six million children? Who will help them avoid lives of servitude or prostitution? Who will pass on to them the traditions of culture and religion, of history and government, of craft and profession? Who will help them grow up, choose the right person to marry, find work, and learn to parent their own children?

Well, as it turns out, no one. Or very few. There aren't enough adults to go around. Although in the Western industrialized states HIV/AIDS has become a chronic condition rather than a death sentence, in Africa a generation of parents, teachers, principals, physicians, nurses, professors, spiritual leaders, musicians, poets, bureaucrats, coaches, farmers, bankers, and business owners are being erased.....



To be continued....