A dollar for community

Need a lift? A kick in the butt? Umm . . . not going to find it here. I'm still not quite up for that. But go read Chris at The Big Yellow House. Life is like baseball, got to keep swinging! I should be ready to step up to the plate again soon. But not today.

I caught most of Nightline last night on ABC. Songs for the Children about the devestation of AIDs in Africa and the way that antiretroviral drugs can keep children alive and more importantly, parents with HIV alive to raise their children. The piece featured Alicia Keyes and the charity Keep A Child Alive. One dollar a day is enough to pay for a daily dose of antiretroviral drugs, the drugs that turn AIDs from a killer into a chronic, managable condition. I can do a dollar a day and I bet that so can you!

Grief is numbing but I'm finding small ways to re-engage with the world. My father's death is saddening but it was not a tragedy. The way that AIDs destroys communities by killing those in their twenties and thirties and forties, those who are raising children and aiding parents, those who teach and nurse and farm and work and produce; that is what sets the AIDs epidemic apart from other epidemics (whose vicitims are generally drawn from the margins of the very young and very old) and makes it a threat not just to individuals but to whole communities. Being at home and witnessing the outpouring of dinners, flowers, cards, calls, and visits around my father's death reinforced my belief in the power of community. I'm grateful now to have a small way to support communities in Africa who are facing such a dire threat as the hollowing out of society that AIDs can inflict.