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The faces of the infected and affected |
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Written by Michael Swan
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 At the centre of the story of AIDS in Africa is 24.5-million people infected with the HIV virus, and 10 times that number who have been affected by the dismemberment of their families, impoverishment of their communities, stigma attached to the virus and a sense of loss which has been ground into every crease and crevice of African life. These are the faces of some of the infected and affected I met over three weeks in Africa.
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Orphanage puts children first |
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Written by Michael Swan
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 KAREN, Kenya - A dozen years ago Sr. Mary Owens buried three children a month — many of them she had helped raise from babyhood to four, five and six years old.
“It was very, very demanding” is as much as the stoic Irish missionary will say about it.
But when she visits the graveyard with a gang of kids five to 12 years old, it’s a struggle for her to keep her professionally cheery, child psychologist front up. The kids make a game of running from cross to cross in their orphanage’s cemetery asking about each of the children buried there. Owens patiently answers their questions.
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Finding meaning in life despite disease |
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Written by Michael Swan
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 ZOMBA, Malawi - Pax Chingawale never thought of himself as the kind of person who ever would or could get AIDS.
If Chingawale was tempted, he might have been tripped by pride in his status as a solid, sober citizen. He had retired from his career as an auditor with Malawi’s government. He had filled the role of an older brother within his family. He was respected within his church and community.
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Finding Christ in Malawi’s poor |
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Written by Michael Swan
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 LILONGWE, Malawi - Tess and Jim O’Mara have come to Malawi looking for the face of Christ in the poor. Statistically, they’ve come to the right place.
Sixty-five per cent of Malawians live in poverty — internationally defined as less than $1.09 per day — but that number doesn’t begin to explain the daily struggle. Half of Malawi’s 13 million people live on less than their own country’s official poverty line of 44 Kwancha, or 35 Canadian cents, a day. But don’t be fooled by that lofty 35-cent number, warns agricultural economist George Kanyama Phiri of Bunda College of Agriculture . He finds a whole class of rural people living on less than 12 cents a day.
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Catholic doctor helps in Africa’s battle with disease |
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Written by Innocent Madawo
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 TORONTO - “Peter is now a strutting teenager with a typical attitude. He now walks with a bounce and speaks with a booming and confident voice,” says Dr. Katherine Rouleau, beaming with pride
To hear her go on about Peter (not his real name), you would think she is a doting mother talking about her overachieving son.
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Rouleau is not a mother. She is a Toronto physician and a Roman
Catholic who juggles a crammed schedule each year to travel to Zomba, a
little known district in the south of Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest
countries.Peter, the 12-year-old she talks of so fondly, was born with
the HIV virus and had wasted away into a “rail thin, no hope child”
whose height and weight did not correspond with his age by mid last
year when Rouleau and her team of caregivers started helping him and
some 1,100 other Malawians with antiretroviral treatments.
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The Human Face 
