I cried this morning. Not because I miss my dog, or want to go home, or any other selfish reason. As I sat on the steps looking out over the town of Manzini, tears fell for Swaziland. We spent the whole morning praying and prophecying over Swazi, and we realized how much favor God has here for the orphans, how much wisdom He wants to bestow upon them. I had been reading 1 Kings 3, about when Solomon asked God for wisdom and discernment, because he was “only a little child and [didn’t] know how to carry out my duties”. The orphans are in the same boat. And God wants to give them immeasurably more. Widsom, a discerning heart, riches and honor, and a long life. Imagine what that would look like in this country of dying youth?!
A couple of days ago one of our AIM contacts, Colin, who is a South African native, shared with us some statistics on the AIDS epidemic in southern Africa. He started by telling us that about 1.2 million Swazis are infected with HIV. That is about 42-44% of the population. The sad part is that those numbers are not very accurate, since many don’t know they are infected, dying at home, and even more unfortunately, the government will not allow doctors to list on death certificates that the cause of death is AIDS. The most prevalent causes of death here in Swazi are tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cancer. (These are all results of having a severe immune system deficiency, the body can’t fight the illness because it doesn’t have enough white blood cells, or T cells, to combat sickness.) the common people here really don’t have a reason to believe they are susceptible to get or transmit HIV/ AIDS.
On top of that, most education is centered around “safe” sex. Research on condom effectiveness for HIV states that 4 in 10 are likely to get HIV, this equals about 60% effectiveness. 40% of the time a person will get HIV even while practicing “safe” sex. Even more unfortunately, promiscuity in this country is rampant. Witch doctors “prescribe” cures for AIDS which are absolutely appalling. They tell infected people that they will be healed if they rape a virgin, thus promoting child and infant rape, and spreading the disease. The South African minister of health offered a cure of garlic and beet juice. And this is supposed to be someone on top of current research. What ever happened to abstinence?
In the end, 80% of people who check into hospitals here in Swazi, don’t come out alive. This has left about 60,000 orphans in Swaziland. Even more, about 30-40% of these orphans have HIV/ AIDS, from birth, or breastfeeding. Swazi officials don’t want to admit that there’s a problem, so they don’t like the idea of building orphanages. If they admit that there’s a growing number of fatherless, they must admit that something is killing off the population, that the country is in the middle of an epidemic. Most orphans live with extended family, who just give them shelter, but can’t afford to feed and clothe them.
That’s where AIM (Gary Black and his family have moved here from CO) and Children’s Hopechest (Tom Davis) are stepping in. They’ve started and are continuing to build carepoints, which are kind of based loosely on Maslow’s heirarchy of needs. These kids need food and clothing. They need education, life skills, they need love, and discipleship at every level. These guys are looking into creating mercy homes (not orphanages) in order to give these orphans a stable home. Mercy homes are single family homes in which there are 1 or 2 parents in one home, to take care of 6-10 kids ( not 100 kids to 1 parent).
Our team is leaving for about a week to go to Nelspruit, on the border of Swazi to check out a possible location for a future mercy home project, we’ll be conducting a kind of feasibility study to see if this is a possibility. We’ll return with info for Gary, and hop along on his vision for Swazi. Gary received a prophetic word that Swazi would be the pulpit of Africa. That people would “get it” here first and bring the message to all of Africa. And the best part is that it will be done through orphans. What an amazing time to be in Africa.
So this morning, although there were tears of sadness, there were also tears of joy, and a hope for the future of Swazi.
