Missionary kid returns home to minister
- Sep 1, 2007 - comment
I returned to my home in Nairobi, Kenya, with a friend, Amy Buchanan, to work for the summer. When we arrived neither of us had experience working with HIV/AIDS, but we were assigned to work with the Baptist AIDS Response Agency (BARA). Part of our job was to travel to various schools presenting the True Love Waits program.
Although I had lived in Kenya my entire life as a missionary kid, and had heard the effects of HIV/AIDS, I knew nothing compared to what I was about to learn.
We presented to high school students the power behind waiting for true love. The presentation began with one simple question asked to youth all around the world, “What are your dreams?” One kid said jokingly that he wanted to be a gangster like 50 Cent, another said a security watchman. The girl on the front row wanted to teach, while her friend wanted to be a mother. The answers were always diverse like the people claiming them, yet each of the responses had one over arching statement: “I want to live.”
Next, we asked, “What can keep you from that dream?” In a small, mud-walled classroom with a mud floor and no windowpanes, the first answers would inevitably be poverty, lack of education, poor nutrition and sickness. Eventually, the students agreed on two things—drug abuse and HIV/AIDS.
In Kenya, where one out of 11 people have HIV/AIDS, secondary students are aware firsthand of this disease. Ask them about the biological components of the virus and its devastating effects and they know about it as if they memorized the book. Yet, while they know an amazing amount, their lack of awareness is astonishing.
They wonder if the virus can be transmitted through kissing and hugging. They want to know if AIDS affects non-Africans, and if it is true that the epidemic is a conspiracy to wipe out the African nations. Some are surprised to hear that it affects everyone and that people in America and Europe die from AIDS, too. Many wonder if it is true that Americans have access to a cure. More than anything, they are surprised to learn that avoiding premarital sex and extramarital affairs will protect them from contracting the virus.
Several thousand Kenyan youths have promised to keep the commitment to wait for true love. For each one that struggles against this temptation, there is one person that will fall to the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS. A young man living in the Shauri Moyo district of Nairobi waited faithfully in prayer for the blessing of marriage after he had signed the commitment card in high school. He is now the father of a small boy and the head of a household that is safe from AIDS.
He is different from the young, pregnant lady from just outside Nairobi. She is dying of the AIDS virus. Her diagnostic report from the testing center states that although she was faithful to her husband, he was not faithful to her. Now, she faces the reality of a hard life, early death and the possibility of the same future for her unborn child. Another woman tested positive for HIV. She works as a seamstress, struggling to remain healthy for her infant daughter who was miraculously born HIV negative.
Throughout Nairobi there are homes for young children and babies orphaned by the AIDS virus. Many orphans battle the disease in their own bodies. One slum area is widely known for its prostitution, where women work for less than a dollar per job. The rate of HIV/AIDS in the area is more than ninety percent.
In the past two months, I learned more about the people of Kenya and their lives than I ever did in the 18 years I lived here. I heard individual stories, making the pandemic more than a story in the news.
I have done, seen and heard so many things that were unimaginable before this trip. Growing up in the midst of an HIV/AIDS pandemic taught me about statistics, but now, because of experiencing it—I know so much more. I know that these statistics do not come close to truly describing the devastating effects taking its toll in the lives of my Kenyan friends and in the country I call home.
Jessica Yates is the child of International Mission Board missionaries, Jack and Bert Yates, who are from Raleigh.
This article is reprinted from the September 1, 2007, issue of the Biblical Recorder, the newsjournal of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.
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