From: Crossroads International [mailto:info@crossroadsinternational.org]
Sent: Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 4:39 PM
Subject: Crossroads International December '08

Hello,

Africa is a place of great beauty but at the same time a place of great violence, despair and disillusionment. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the growing tragedy called AIDS that is engulfing the southern half of the continent.

The AIDS crisis is more than a plague. It is a cauldron of violence, destruction, evil, loss, and human tragedy which is tearing whole societies apart, destroying the family as we know it, and killing off entire generations, often leaving behind only the old and the very young.

AIDS is a killer whose grip reaches far beyond the grave touching the innocence of other lives bringing with it destruction in life altering proportions. Behind each statistic, each death, each tragedy is the life of a person.

AIDS was given a face for me a few years ago when I came across the true story of three children recently orphaned by AIDS. The story of these three children, we call the Othendewni Three, is a tragic story, graphically depicting a cycle of human tragedy that not only effects the life of the one suffering with AIDS, but beyond it into the lives of those around that life.

Here is their story.

The Othendewni Three

It’s a cold day in August just before 7 o’clock in the evening. Pretty and her two younger brothers, Sizwe who is 4 years old and Nakampe who is 2 are with their mother at home when their father arrives home after being gone for many months looking for work, a journey that has taken him hundreds of miles away to the diamond mines of Kimberley.

They just finished dinner and Pretty’s mother offers to make something for her father but it’s evident he is in a foul mood. Something’s wrong. Even at a young age of 5 Pretty can sense the hatred in the air. Her father has been drinking; she can smell it on him as he brushes by.

Her mother asks what is wrong which ignites a firestorm of accusations and counter accusations of sexual unfaithfulness. Pretty and her two brother’s retreat to a far corner of their two room house huddled down in cowering fear.

Through the rising volume of rage Pretty listens to her father accuse her mother of being unfaithful and of giving him AIDS, something he has just found out after visiting a clinic on his way back home. Pretty’s mother counters with her own pent up anger hurling accusations of his unfaithfulness and having given her the dreaded AIDS virus.

As anger fuels rage Pretty’s father loses it and attacks her mother beating her senseless in front of the children who paralyzed by fear can neither move nor close their eyes which are fixated upon the brutality unfolding before them.

Dragging his semiconscious wife into the bedroom he ties her hands and feet to the bedposts dousing the bed with kerosene from a lamp which moments ago sat on the dining table providing the solitary light source for the house.

Emerging he quietly ushers his three young children outside a safe distance from the house and reenters the house setting it on fire. The father returns and gathers his children by his side as they watch in horrified silence their house go up in flames, the crackling of the wood smothered only by the harrowing screams of their mother who only minutes ago had held them and played with them.

After committing this heinous crime the father abandons the 3 children in the bush. The police are called. They come and gather the children taking them to a small poorly funded orphanage, housed in an old broken down farm house, called Othendewni. It is the only place which will receive them because by now it’s rumored they too might have AIDS. Therefore no one offers to take them in; no one offers them any comfort.

Alone, frightened, and traumatized three young children who a few hours ago played and laughed with their mom are now strangers at an orphanage, clinging to each other. There is not offer of counseling -- no one is qualified to offer this; food is scarce -- this orphanage isn’t on the government subsidy list because it doesn’t meet minimum health and regulatory standards for an orphanage; beds are even scarcer – children have to double up in the small hospital cribs used as beds for twenty children who call Othendewni home. Some children sleep in shifts sharing the few cribs with as many as three other children.

Stories like The Othendewni Three are repeated over and over again in countless children’s lives that have been shattered by AIDS. We cannot stand by and do nothing we must act, the love of God compels us to thrust our hands into the mire of this evil and set a course which will affect those destinies we can.

Surprisingly though the majority of Christians seem unmoved by the plight of the AIDS orphans. Years ago an email from Chuck Colson came across my desk decrying the lack of compassion he has witnessed on the part of American Christians for AIDS orphans.

In his email he quoted a study by the Barna Research group and commissioned by World Vision which found that born-again American Christians were less likely than non-Christians to support children orphaned by AIDS.

This discovery remains as puzzling as it is disturbing. In his email Mr. Colson makes the statement that “caring for the poor, and orphans in particular, is exactly what Christ expects of His Church. That turning our backs on these kids is the same as turning our backs on Him”. He ended with this challenge – “the crisis of AIDS orphans cries out for the kind of response only Christians can deliver: one that combines compassion with a respect for God’s truth”.

I couldn’t agree more.

For Christ,
Kent Kelley
Founder & President
Crossroads International

"I am the LORD, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?" Jeremiah 32:27

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