wfn.org | [ENS] Listening: South African HIV/AIDS projects show 'hope amidst

["Matthew Davies" <mdavies@episcopalchurch.org>]

Episcopal News Service
Listening, Learning & Epiphany

Monday, January 23, 2006

South African HIV/AIDS projects show 'hope amidst despair'

TEAC sees local church in action during its South African consultation

By Mike McCoy

Photographs accompanying this article are available online at:
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/40/75/acns4097.cfm

[ENS, Source: Anglican Communion News Service] The working group
Theological
Education for the Anglican Communion (TEAC) took time out of its January
14-21 meeting in South Africa to visit local church-based HIV/AIDS
projects
and to see some of the realities that theological education must
address.

TEAC member Elizabeth Appleby of Brisbane, Australia, said that the
churches' work alongside people living with AIDS was a sign of "hope in
the
midst of despair" because it showed unconditional acceptance of people
when
they were most vulnerable.

The 34-member body gathered January 14 to draft its proposals for the
reshaping of Anglican theological education, as mandated by the Primates
in
2002.

Servants of the community

On January 18, TEAC members spent a morning with two community-based
projects run by Anglican churches in the Diocese of the Highveld, east
of
Johannesburg, and visited a Roman Catholic job-creation scheme that
includes
many people living with AIDS.

The visits were arranged by the Rev. Marlene Rodda, a deacon in the
diocese
and coordinator of the diocese's social responsibility programs. Victor
Matshikiza, a retired school principal who works extensively in HIV/AIDS
programs, also accompanied the group.

The first stop was All Souls' Parish in Tsakane, a major center for
home-based care and HIV/AIDS counseling, and a day care center for
children
affected by AIDS.

The parish's Tsepo-Hope Project -- endorsed and supported by the South
African Departments of Health and Social Welfare -- was described as the
"flagship" of non-governmental HIV/AIDS programs in South Africa.

Project coordinator Flower Boyi told TEAC that the center's main
activity
was to send volunteer home-based care workers (HCWs) into the community,
both to visit people in the advanced stages of AIDS-related illnesses
each
day, and to help their families to care for them.

Parish-based counselors are trained to work alongside the HCWs, and food
parcels are taken each month to needy families.

At the parish church, a day care center feeds and cares for a large
group of
young children whose parents have died from AIDS-related diseases, or
who
are themselves HIV-positive.

Welcoming the TEAC group to All Souls -- a church building whose
interior is
strikingly decorated with African art and artifacts -- the rector, the
Rev.
Ziphozonke Mnyandu, said the church's role was to be servants of the
wider
community.

A few kilometers down the road, TEAC members visited the
Kopanang-Sithand'izingane Centre run by nuns of the Roman Catholic
Dominican
Community. Begun in 2002 in response to the 80 percent unemployment rate
in
the area, the center trains women in sewing, embroidery, paper-making,
and
work with beads. It also offers organic vegetable market-farming and
houses
a day care center for HIV/AIDS-impacted children.

Coordinator Sister Sheila Flynn spoke passionately of the challenge that
HIV/AIDS poses not just to the church's pastoral care but also to its
theology.

"We need to walk with the suffering, without always being able to 'fix'
it,"
she said.

She told TEAC that 75 percent of the world's HIV-infected people are in
Southern Africa, and that half of the South Africans who are now 15
years
old will be dead before they are 30.

"AIDS challenges us to do theology that is rooted in human dignity,
because
it reveals how we deal with each other," she said. "Theology is
'God-talk'
-- so our theology must be rooted in the reality of people's lives."

"How can we not believe in God?"

TEAC's final visit was to the Bambanani Community Care Centre in
Dukathole,
in the industrial zone of Germiston. The center is a diocesan project
that
serves a community of 15,000 people living in an informal settlement
squeezed into a small area between the local factories.

An unemployment rate of between 80 and 90 percent means that most of the
people in Dukathole live in extreme poverty, and HIV-infection rates are
high.

In 2001, a local woman who was herself HIV-positive, Margaret "Numsa"
Sikhwari, began an AIDS-awareness and home-care center in a shack behind
her
house in Dukathole. With church and other funding, the center is now
housed
in a converted container opposite the local primary school.

Members of TEAC were divided into groups, and accompanied the center's
home-based care workers into the homes of several of the 150 people they
visit every week. Their main job was to deliver food parcels, but in
some
cases the TEAC visitors were asked to pray with those they had gone to
see
-- including HIV-positive infants, young parents with advanced AIDS, and
bed-ridden grandmothers.

Afterwards, Marlene Rodda told TEAC members of a mother whose young
child
had just been buried after dying from AIDS-related diseases. A friend
asked,
"How can you believe in God when all this is happening?"

"How can you not believe in God at a time like this?" she replied.

In a time of reflection back at the conference center, TEAC members
agreed
that their visits had shown the importance of theological education that
helped Anglicans to go beyond simply dealing with urgent needs, and to
analyze and critique current realities such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Bishop Simon Chiwanga of Tanzania summed up the day's visits: "What we
did
today was an example of good theological education: we engaged and dealt
with real issues in a situation, and then reflected on it together."

-- Mike McCoy is corresponding secretary to ANITEPAM and a course
coordinator with the TEE College of Southern Africa. He served the South
African meeting of TEAC as its chaplain.

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