By Marie O’Halloran

AIDS is sweeping mercilessly across Africa leaving only orphans and old people in its wake. A missionary priest, Fr. Owen Lambert, who has been living in Ethiopia for many years now, does his bit to stem the tide. Read on.

“Famine, war, drought or revolution – but AIDS is more than all of them. They will never touch society the same way that AIDS has,” says Father Owen Lambert. A priest with the Holy Ghost order, he has been a long-time resident of Ethiopia and has the stark statistics of the virus and its impact in Africaat his fingertips. “There are up to 600 deaths a day in Ethiopia alone,” he says. “Some 60 percent of Ethiopian adults between 15 and 49 will be dead in 2015, according to a study by the renowned African Medical Institute and Jimma Health Centre.”

Short life

Adulthood starts young in Africa and the prospects are catastrophic with an average life expectancy of 49 years. When the Mengistru regime in Ethiopia was ousted, his army of between 400,000 soldiers was disbanded, with some 42 percent of them HIV-positive. Across race and social class, the virus “is really hitting at the core of the society, its leaders, its breadwinners”.

Prevention through education

Father Lambert, who divides his time between Ireland and east Africa, wants to establish an AIDS Partnership for Africa to help countries like Ethiopia “to deal with the huge levels of death and what will remain and to help people develop coping mechanisms”.

Progressive danger

The Holy Ghost priest facilitates existing efforts to deal with the crisis and starting new AIDS programmes. He is involved with the Italian Agency CVM, which has made significant progress in dealing with AIDS in the northwest of Ethiopia. CVM, which receives substantial funding from a number of agencies including Ireland Aid, started in the city of Bahir Dar and now operates in a region covering 10 million people, including street children. There are already 5,000 street children in Bahir Dar with a population of about 10,000, and the number is steadily growing as their parents die from AIDS.

There is a phenomenon where older men rape virgins in the belief that it will cure them of AIDS. Ateteb Gashaw (10) looks after her three-year old sister, after both her parents died from AIDS, and begs on the street. She was one of the victims.

AIDS warfare

The Christian, Orthodox and Islamic communities in Ethiopia have been instrumental in reducing the stigma of AIDS. They are encouraging tolerance and campaigning on the issue. Some 600 Orthodox priests have been trained as counselors and many will bathe and prepare a corpse for burial as part of the efforts to reduce fears.

Often the men go to the city to work and when they return home months later, “a lot of women have insisted that their husbands be tested before being readmitted into their home”. It is a sign of progress.

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Change your behavior: a teaching drama

The message is blunt, direct and in dramatic form. Free shows in schools, market places and wherever people meet tells a story with the anti-AIDS warning: change your behavior.

The tale is of a father and a son, living in the same home. Unbeknownst to each other, both of them are sleeping with the maid.

The son is a “man about town”, with three or four girlfriends. One of his girlfriends hasn’t slept with him. He proposes marriage and then pleads, according to a translation of the drama, “We have been in love for the last two weeks, why don’t we have sex?”

She responds, “We are in the modern society, we don’t have sex before marriage and we have to be screened for HIV before marriage.” So the son gets screened and turns out to be HIV-positive. He confesses to the father: “I have committed sex with many girls, including the servant. So please forgive me, I have done wrong.”

“You have AIDS and you slept with our servant,” says the father, who collapses. He realized he probably is HIV-positive as well. The maid, in the background, hears the revelations and realizes that she, too, is most likely positive. It is a disaster. They are all HIV-positive.

But the message at the end of the drama is “Having HIV doesn’t mean the end of life. You can live if you take care of yourself. We have to tell others and teach them to change their ways.”

Dramatic presentation is one of the most effective ways of getting a message across in an area where 70% of the population is illiterate. The message reflects “The Dawn of Hope”, which is also the name of an organization of the people in the Ethiopian city of Bahir Dar, who are living with HIV/AIDS.