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Churches Need To Lead Drive For AIDS Education
Washington Afro-American (Capital Edition)
Washington, DC
03.03.01
For the past 12 years, The Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing
of AIDS has helped to mobilize over 10,000 churches to provide AIDS
education to their congregations.
Despite this, over two million churches in the Black community
are still in denial and remain silent about this stigma of AIDS,
which is destroying our communities.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a news report released Feb.
20 called the HIV/AIDS epidemic "the most formidable development
challenge of our time."
He said, "By the end of 2000, 36.1 million men, women and
children around the world were living with HIV or AIDS and 21.8
million had died from the disease. The same year an estimated 5.3
million new infections globally and 3 million deaths, the highest
annual total of AIDS deaths ever."
He said that leadership is vital to the understanding of the epidemic
and that "One of the key issues facing the global community
is developing and sustaining such dedicated leadership, vital if
the nature of the epidemic is to be clearly understood throughout
society and a national response mobilized."
A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, reported in "The
Untold Story: AIDS and Black Americans,' March 1998, revealed that
HIV/AIDS is seen by African-Americans as an urgent health problem
facing the national and local communities.
AIDS is rated above cancer and heart disease.
The survey also found that many African-Americans see AIDS as a
problem close to home.
Yet, Pernessa C. Seele, founder/CEO of the Black Church Week of
Prayer for the Healing of AIDS said, "12 years ago when I was
working at Harlem Hospital in New York, I was stunned by the sight
of people and families suffering from AIDS amid a seemingly heartless
community, that neither understood the reasons for their pain, nor
sought to alleviate their suffering."
She asked the question, "How could Black America, for the
first time in its history, turn away from brothers and sisters caught
in a crisis that could destroy the community at its very roots?"
She wanted to know why the response to AIDS was different from
the response to such crisis as enslavement, discrimination and lynching.
"Missing," she said, "was the faith imperative -
the directive from religious leaders to their congregations to learn,
act and care as their Lord would expect of them in the age of HIV/AIDS."
The Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS is being
held this year, March 4 through 10. Is your church beginning lent
with an understanding of this killing epidemic? If not, logon to
http://www.balmingilead.org and join the other 10,000 churches who
have taken up the fight against HIV/AIDS because they believe that
prayer, education and financial commitment change things.
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