The Messenger - December 2007 - Home Comfort
By Gerry Clarke, SJ - 01 December 2007
THE POPE’S INTENTIONS: This month the Pope asks us to pray ‘that all people show care for those stricken with AIDS, especially children and women, and that they see the Church as a sign of the Lord’s love’.
I am writing from a presbytery in the Highlands of Kwa-Zulu Natal where the winter sun shines more brightly than the summer sun in Ireland. Snow has fallen and everything comes to a stop. In the rondavel dwellings (traditional African-style houses), scattered without pattern across the hills, the people struggle on without water or electricity.
The temperature drops to - 4°C and we huddle around a log fire, waiting out the thaw. Within two days the sun has burned away the white blanket of snow and we can drive out to the building site in Franklin beside the Catholic church. Our project is to build three new classrooms and an ablution or bathroom block for children in the locality.
Epidemic
HIV/AIDS has hit this area hard. You can’t see it so obviously at first because you are only mixing with the healthy people. But then you begin to notice the children who are not so well and the adults who don’t move about so much. These are the silent sufferers of AIDS. Often they don’t know it’s HIV and they certainly won’t call it AIDS, but only AIDS weakens the immune system so profoundly that so many strong, young people die of tuberculosis or flu.
My own small experience of illness tells me that being sick is like being in a different world; all the more so when your illness is not going to improve. Existence becomes very bleak indeed.
Around the world 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and the pandemic has already killed some 22 million people and has left 13 million orphans in its wake. And the epidemic marches on.
Often the face of AIDS is a grandmother looking after numerous little grandchildren: she’s carrying the burden that should be carried by her own children but AIDS has swept them away. I remember seeing a little boy doing the rounds of the rondavel dwellings in his locality looking for something to eat from his neighbours. When there’s no one to provide, begging is the only way to find a meal.
Practical Help
This is where our church is offering real help in the Diocese of Kokstad, Kwa-Zulu Natal. Many local women have formed groups which offer Home Help to HIV/AIDS sufferers. It means visiting sufferers every day to chat and to see what they need. Often a trip to the chemist or the market is simply not possible for the ill and it takes a long time to warm up if you wake up cold in a rondavel without electricity.
This is where the Home Helps make a huge difference. Fetching water and fuel, cleaning and preparing a meal all take time, and an AIDS sufferer only has a certain amount of energy to expend daily. Home Help is a simple service but it makes a world of a difference.
And above all, Home Help brings human contact which can so often be denied to AIDS sufferers. Sometimes they are avoided or stigmatized as if they were being punished for sin, and instinctively our fear of infection makes us hesitate when it comes to human contact.
The experts assure us that normal human contact carries no risk of infection. A simple hug or a handshake is enough to reassure a person that they are respected and recognized as a person despite their illness. And this brings us close to what Jesus wanted to do when he proclaimed in the synagogue that he had come to preach the good news to the poor.
The work of home helps becomes more than just a helping hand: it can become a dialogue, leading both patient and carer into spiritual conversation, the kind of interaction that builds faith, hope and love.
Question of Suffering
God is unfolding a loving plan for each one of us, and suffering is part of that. We need people to remind us of this reality because illness makes the horizon look so bleak. St. Ignatius of Loyola, the soldier-saint, found God in his sickbed. He discovered a whole new vision and energy to life through the reflections and conversations he had when convalescing from a nearly mortal wound.
Isn’t that a challenge for all volunteers trying to practise Christian charity, in the St. Vincent de Paul Society and many other organizations and institutions countrywide?
So, as we join the Pope this month in praying for AIDS sufferers worldwide, let us think of those home-helps who are bringing loving care to little rondavel dwellings on the hillsides of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Let us thank God for their generosity and ask the Lord to bless them for their kindness.