The Road that leads to Pompeii

Stephen Lewis’  Pandemic:  My Country is on its Knees addresses  the effects AIDS has on Africa.  In the 1960’s, when Lewis first began visiting Africa he described it as a  “continent of vitality, growth, and boundless expectations …. There was something intoxicating about an environment of such hope, anticipation, affection, energy indomitability” (p. 378).  However, 45 years later the situation has changed and he says that is it “like comparing Rome with Pompeii” (p. 378).  It is a country crumbling under the weight of a virus. 

The essay is a powerful. The purpose is to inform those who live in countries beyond the crisis zone, countries of wealth and resources, what’s happening in Africa and encouraging them to get involved.  It also suggests that without changes, without outside resources, Africa will die because AIDS will continue killing out millions more people.  Lewis appeals to the audiences emotions with strong examples.  Over and over he tells stories of the despair that he has witnessed.  He speaks of a grandmother who has had to bury all five of her adult children and her four grandchildren are HIV-positive.  But, he said there’s even worse things then this.  Orphaned children are having to run the household and care for their brothers and sisters.  This means that without a mother or father or grandparent the head-of-the-house might be as young as eight years old.  It is creating a nation where the “… transfer of love and knowledge and values and experience from one generation to the next is gone … (p. 382).  I think the worst situation he describes is of young children watching their parents dying, especially when death is long, painful and full of embarrassing events. 
Although Lewis’ essay addresses the desperate situation Africa faces he does says that there’s good changes.  Organizations are helping Africans help themselves.  For example the UN’s World Food Programme, had gathered together a large contingent of truck drivers … who had undergone a training course on HIV prevention” (p. 386).  This group were likely to encounter sex workers on their delivery routes.  Condoms are distributed freely to help stop the spread.  Of AIDS. Girls are being educated in trades so that they will be able to stay and work in their own communities, and expectant mothers who were HIV-positive are being given drugs to prevent the virus spreading to their babies.  The most positive change is where Doctors Without Borders had set up a treatment program and were helping over 1000 people and had plans to help thousands more. 
Lewis wants the world to care about Africa’s situation and if the world does care he thinks Africa will gather strength and become what it once was:  a national vitality.
Do you think the Catholic Church’s view against condom use will encourage men and women to have sex without using one, even with the threat of AIDS hanging over them?