Just back from a rural village –
ground zero in Swaziland’s slow motion horror show
where AIDS and culture dance a

Dance
Macabre. I’ve thought about, how can I help you blog readers feel
something of the terror that some of the adults who have been left alive feel?

It’s the odd story that best
communicates it. Adrienne Ashby tells one that hits
home:

God is faithful to show me my folly
within the first week of my arrival in Swaziland. I am at Orphan Camp. There
are thousands of children and somehow our team and about a dozen Swazi
grandmothers are supposed to organize the chaos.

The Swazi grandmothers,
otherwise known as Go-go’s, win hands down. These sixty year-old women are a
true phenomenon. They are not only raising a generation of orphans, they are
practically running the country since their own children are dying of AIDS.

I have a conversation with one of the Go-go’s, and she shares with me a
horrible but not unusual situation. When her first husband died of AIDS, she
remarried only to discover he too had AIDS and he immediately died after she
gave birth to their child. The parents of her first husband are enraged because
she did not marry their other son as Swazi tradition and they are intent on
murdering her brand new baby.

She tells me it’s like living a nightmare.
She can’t turn her head from the child for a second. We pray and in my prayer
something radically shifts in my mentality. I keep praying for the hope of
heaven and the Kingdom of God to reign. I have never used those
terms in my prayers before, and I understand God is teaching me something new
about this topic of social justice. I realize I cannot, even with the best
theories and all the degrees in the world change her situation. I can only give
hope.

Adrienne is
wrestling with an issue that most of us who are ensconced in American living
rooms will never confront. The paradox is that our lives are enriched as we do.
It’s because Jesus’ heart is for justice; as we take up the cause of the poor
in spirit, those who are blessed, we become blessed as
well.