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Friday, April 12 - Thursday, April 19, 2002
Nigeria, West Africa

"We Cannot Fold Our Hands"

After a successful week in Côte d'Ivoire, The Balm In Gilead team went to Nigeria with high hopes. The mission in Nigeria was particularly ambitious: to bring together Christian and Muslim faith leaders to develop plans to address HIV/AIDS together. This work was done in the cities of Lagos, Abuja (the capital), and Jos.

In Nigeria, HIV/AIDS is a silent epidemic. It's still hidden, in part because of the latency period of the virus, but also because of denial, stigma, and discrimination. Most people do not know they're infected, so the worst of the epidemic is yet to come. According to Nigeria's National AIDS & STD Control Programme, Federal Ministry of Health, it is estimated that one person dies every 2 minutes, which is about 800 Nigerians every day. There are approximately 3.47 million people between the ages of 15 and 49 who are HIV positive, with the worst hit group under the age of 30. By 2015, the AIDS epidemic is expected to increase the number of orphans from 1.4 million to over 11 million if the current trend is not reversed.

The Balm In Gilead has partnered with the Christian Health Association of Nigeria, the Catholic Episcopal Conference, the Christian Association of Nigeria, and representatives of an Islamic group working on HIV/AIDS, among others, and created a joint body to plan a program to turn those numbers around.

"Harlem and any other black community in the U.S. looks just like Nigeria. There is a church on every corner," said Pernessa Seele during one of the joint meetings. "The Middle Passage took away everything but our love for God. This Ibo woman has come back home to bridge the African American faith community with their brothers and sisters in Nigeria to fight the plague of AIDS. We don't know each other, we don't speak the same languages, but we love the Lord. The churches and the mosques have a great role to play in this pandemic - we cannot address HIV/AIDS effectively without their leadership," said Seele.

We began sharing our message in the city of Lagos, which has four times the population of New York City and is urban chaos at its best. There's a scramble going on in this city and the congestion, overcrowding, and pollution can attest to that. But, as Seele said, "there is a church on every corner." We went down streets where there were three or four churches and a mosque, and there were countless streets like this throughout the city. It is here that the power of religion has so much potential to fight the scourge of HIV/AIDS.

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