austraLasia 1494
Choose Life! A perspective on HIV/AIDS
(A 'toward #1500' entry - also from Melanesia)
HONIARA: 18th March 2006 -- Bishop Kevin Dowling CssR
has been touring Melanesia with a simple message: "Choose Life - and do
all we can to help others choose life!", his closing words at the
Eucharistic celebration at Holy Cross Cathedral, Honiara this
week. Bishop Dowling had just come from Papua New Guinea where he
also spoke on the subject of HIV/AIDS. Bishop Dowling is Bishop of
Rustenburg, the site of the world's largest platinum mines in North
West South Africa - but also some of the worst squatter settlements in
the nation, where HIV/AIDS is rife at 47.2% of the local population. He
set up the Bishops' National AIDS Office which runs programs hardest
hit in the five most worst affected nations in Africa.
The HIV and AIDS pandemic throughout the world is
affecting every aspect of life today - individuals, families
(especially), communities and societies, Bishop Dowling said. It
is seriously impacting the economies of countries by taking skilled
workers out of the market - sick, dying, unable to work. it even
threatens the survival of some small societies or nations, e.g.
Swaziland and Botswana - and Solomon Islands is a small nation of fewer
than 500,000 people.
Bishop Dowling soon warmed to his real message,
which was not one of scary statistics, but that people in societies
such as in Melanesia are "religious" - the spiritual dimension is part
of them, and can be built on. Churches and Faith communities can have a
positive or negative effect on people by way of the attitudes and
beliefs they build up in people and communities concerning HIV
infection. "Our goal should be to enable people to affirm 'I am not
this cancer of the bone...leukaemia...HIV positive...I am a
person'. As a person I am not separate from the beauty of nature,
animals, all forms of life. Everything is interconnected.
Spiritual or being spiritual means regarding everything as sacred, and
a way to transform myself/ourselves from within. It is a journey
to awareness of God, a higher power, in me; to inner stillness,
meaning, the ability to live in the now, to be present to myself and to
God".
The bishop recognized that those who are dying of
AIDS need accompaniment, and that people who share this aspect of those
individuals' 'now' are crucial to positive, life-giving acceptance, to
letting go of the past and the fear of the future. Bishop Dowling
likened the opposite attitude - rejection - as akin to apartheid.
The one discriminated on the basis of colour or race, the other
discriminates on the basis of disease. The proper message is "God
loves you and accepts you as you are. No matter what has happened
in your life God loves and forgives. God will never reject you -
we will not either".
In 2005, some 8.3 million people were living with
HIV in Asia,
including 1.1 million people who became newly infected in the past
year. AIDS claimed some 520,000 lives in 2005. An estimated
74,000 people in Oceania are living with HIV.
Although less than 4,000 people are believed to have died of AIDS in
2005, about 8,200 are thought to have become newly infected with
HIV. Among young people 15–24 years of age, an estimated 1.2% of
women and 0.4% of men were living with HIV in 2005.
_________________________
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