My First Experience with HIV

A normal day of traveling to a village for ministry took a dramatic turn with an announcement from our pastor. He informed us we were going to stop and pray for a woman who was sick. There was nothing unordinary about this announcement because we do this almost daily in some capacity. When we entered the house though we found something very different and unexpected.
 
Inside were 3 young boys under the age of 10, their grandmother, and 2 older men. Through the next room we could see the head of someone lying motionless on a mattress under a white blanket on the floor. It was then we learned that this woman was the 30-year-old mother of Michael, the 10-year-old boy, and his 2 younger siblings. She was infected with HIV and the hospital had sent her home because there was nothing else they could do to help her. We also learned that Michael’s father died of HIV when he was a very young boy.
 
So now here we were huddled in a small living room with a family that knew their mother/sister/daughter was experiencing her final breaths. It was at this point that I began to a have small understanding of the AIDS problem in Africa. It is something I’ve heard about to some extent my entire life, but Africa was so far away. I would hear statistics or maybe even a story about HIV in Africa and then could go back to whatever I had been previously doing without giving it a second thought. But that was before I met Michael.
 
Now I was sitting in a room with a 10-year-old boy who had tears in his eyes and who was being as strong as anyone could ask. It was then that HIV wasn’t just a statistic anymore. I was watching in real time as it changed this young boy’s life forever. It had taken his father and would soon take his mother (She died later that evening).
 
In Masaka, Uganda where we are living the government says that 10% of the population is HIV positive, but according to our pastor that number is actually much closer to 30%. A few years ago 90% of the children with parents who had HIV were also born with the disease. Now thanks to modern medicine that number has been lowered to around 40%. At the school our pastor runs 20 of the 150 students are HIV positive.
 
Thankfully Michael is one of the lucky ones who didn’t contract the disease from his parents. However, this terrible disease will forever impact Michael’s life. He is being forced to grow up way too soon and unfortunately this story is repeating itself everyday all around this country, this continent and the world.
 
In about an hour we will be going to the burial for Michael’s mother. I know the pain and sadness for his family and other HIV affected families has to be almost unbearable, but thankfully as Christians we have the hope of Jesus. Thankfully the burial of our earthly bodies isn’t the end.
 

 
 

 
Thank you Jesus that this life isn’t the end and that there is hope even in the midst of pain.