What do you do when your baby’s life is threatened?

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

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.