The Compassion Cure
What others are reading:
No related posts found!
LF: What keeps you inspired and what keeps you going?
CN: Definitely Winfrida. I’m not doing the hard work; I’m just raising money. Winfrida is just amazing. There was one time that I didn’t think I could continue to do this. In January of 2007 we had a chicken pox outbreak, and two of the girls couldn’t survive with their compromised immune systems. I was devastated. It took a while to recover from that, but now I feel like it’s amazing that we have this land and building that are paid for, in full. We have kids who are happy and healthy—it is all so much more than I could have hoped for. Those kids are such an inspiration. They are so strong and willing to embrace happiness. And Winfrida is such a calm, peaceful woman with a big heart.
LF: What is your most pressing issue now?
CN: I was back in Tanzania recently trying to get a few of our kids into a school there. They were happy to have them at first, but I felt like I needed to make sure that the school’s administration knew that they were HIV-positive. And when I told them, the administrators started making all kinds of excuses about why it might not be a good idea for the boys to attend. They actually said, ‘What do we do if they are bleeding on the playground?’ And I said, “What do you do if any of your current students are bleeding on the playground?’
That conversation really drove home that we need to focus on community HIV education programs. We need to focus on prevention, and the only way that’s going to happen successfully is through grassroots community action. It’s not something outsiders can do. It has to happen at a community level.
LF: As the children in the orphanage age, what kind of life is waiting for them?
CN: The kids from my first visit to Tanzania are now teenagers. They didn’t know that they had HIV when they came to St. Lucia. There’s so much stigma attached to being HIV-positive or having AIDS. It’s really hard to tell them. And what they hear about it is so bad. One of our girls got very depressed when she was told. She thought it was her fault. All she had heard about HIV was that you get it if you do something bad. She thought she’d done something bad. She is learning to cope with being HIV-positive with counseling. But as the kids get older we treat them as we would any teenage entering adulthood. The only difference is that we are teaching them how to care for themselves being HIV-positive. We are teaching the importance of good nutrition, and we’re giving them education so they can support themselves.
LF: What do you hope people learn from your experiences?
CN: I hope people can come away with a little more compassion for the hardships that people in Africa suffer due to the AIDS epidemic—and that you can do something about it. Every little bit matters. You don’t have to do something big to make a difference. A hug can go a long way.
Winfrida, Connie Naber’s inspiration, runs the St. Lucia Children’s Home. More information about Connie Naber’s efforts can be found at her website: www.karamaconnection.org