April 5, 2004

Dear Friends,

She stretched out on the examination table with her enormous belly. Then my heart sank when I saw her shingles scar. I thought to myself, “Oh no, here’s another one.” The patient had been sent for an ultrasound scan to rule out twins. As it turned out, she did have twins, but the issue of her HIV status also needed to be addressed. I discussed with her the fact that we have free and voluntary HIV counseling for anyone who wants it. She did go to the counselor and she is infected with the virus.

Friends, we are in the season of Lent, a time of sober reflection and self-examination. In Isaiah we read, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

In the New York Times of March 28, 2004, Stephen Lewis, the special United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa tells the world, “There are no excuses left, no rationalizations to hide behind, no murky slanders to justify indifference—there will only be the mass graves of the betrayed.”

As one of your PC(USA) mission co-workers here in the middle of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I can report to you honestly that the promised $15 billion dollars has turned into $200 million requested from Congress. Only four of the eighty hospitals in the southern region of Malawi have the anti-retroviral medicines tonight.

As I read the political discussions and the news articles about the AIDS epidemic, I often ask myself, “Really, why would anyone care about these Africans dying of AIDS unless they were Christians?” “And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My Brethren, you did it to Me.’

Dr. Sue Makin
Obstetrician/Gynecologist

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 58