Malawi and Dignitas hope for a future without AIDS

Dec 4 2011 under malawi | Leave a comment

This article was prepared for World AIDS Day and originally published at Canada’s Toronto Star website on December 1, 2011.

When Montreal’s Dr. James Orbinski was taken aback when he visited a hospital in Malawi in 2004.

“It was a living hell,” Orbinski writes in An imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-First Century. “My knees weakened as I looked around. The hospital was overrun with desperately sick patients. A hundred and fifty people were crammed into a ward that had only 30 beds. Sick people were lying under trees outside. Ninety-per cent of the sick were HIV-positive. It was not a hospital but a morgue.”

This experience inspired Orbinski and a colleague, James Fraser, to leave Doctors Without Borders in 2004 and start Dignitas International, a smaller NGO that would focus on community-based care for people living with HIV and AIDS.

Some seven years later, there’s good news to report from Malawi.

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Meet John —No parents, HIV-positive, and in school

Aug 25 2011 under malawi | Leave a comment

Meet Jonathan – “Big John,” I overheard a friend call him, despite the fact that he is quite small for his age.

Jonathan’s parents died when he was 10, leaving the child on the streets and forced to fend for himself. So that’s what Johnathan did.

Shy about the details, Jonathan told me that after the last of his family had disappeared, he realized that nobody was going to take care of him. He accepted this, found a routine place to sleep, and joined the ranks of Blantyre’s uncounted street kids. And then, somewhat settled, Jonathan walked to the nearest hospital he knew of.

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Think about spending $15 a month to put a Malawian orphan through school

Aug 21 2011 under malawi | 1 Comment

I’ve long held some disdain for CNN’s annual “Heroes” television event.

I considered it a self-serving affair; a chance for a superfluous news network to flatter and aggrandize itself by filling a room full of celebrities that could then be filmed applauding good people who were poorer than them.

And what is a hero, anyways? Most instances of the word refer to the man who has spilled the most blood.

Then I spent an afternoon with one of CNN’s heroes –no quotation marks. My attitude has changed.

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