For over 40 years, CRWRC has been working with communities to overcome poverty. In communities around the world, AIDS is overwhelming the healthcare system and disintegrating family and community support networks.

Development programs, improved agriculture, infrastructure for small businesses, and other advancements are all falling apart as people and communities struggle to deal with this disease.

Currently there are about 40.3 million people around the world were living with HIV and AIDS, 4.1 million people were newly infected this year, and 2.8 million people lost their lives. The UN Secretary, General Kofi Annan told the UN General Assembly on June 2, 2006 that “the epidemic continues to outpace us.”

Unfortunately, those most affected by this crisis are those least able to respond to it - the poor, hungry, and under-educated. These people are often the first to get infected. Once ill, they are even less likely to be able to work to pay for food or health care they so desperately need. This, in turn, leads to complications with their illness, unhealthy choices, and a spread of the infection.

In fact, poverty and HIV and AIDS feed one another in a vicious cycle that cannot be broken without help. Poverty causes people to be poorly nourished and to be poorly educated; as a result they are more prone to fall ill with AIDS-related diseases, and less likely to be able to access the health care they so desperately require.

Poverty sometimes presses the male head of a household to look for work in a far away major city. During a time of prolonged absence from his spouse and the norms of his community, the man may succumb to the temptation to be unfaithful. Some time later, the man may return home sick, and infect his wife. Any future children are also at high risk of contracting the disease.

The desperation of poverty also drives women to turn to prostitution, stay with an unfaithful husband, or put up with abuse, and may prevent them from protecting themselves from HIV infection even when they know that their partner is HIV-positive.

Children, too, are impacted. Many are born with HIV and AIDS, their parents get sick and die, and the children are left on their own to face a life of poverty where they the cycle of AIDS and poverty threatens to spiral downward even further. Many of today’s cases of HIV infection are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Fortunately, the global crisis of AIDS is starting to receive the attention it deserves. Twenty-five years after the disease was first identified, media and celebrity attention has finally begun to increase public awareness of HIV/AIDS. Voices like Nelson Mandela, Angelina Jolie, Bill Hybels, Stephen Lewis, Rick Warren, Bono, Sharon Stone, Bill Gates, and Bill Clinton have encouraged public action and are pressing world leaders to make AIDS a priority in international spending. CRWRC rejoices that people of influence are adding their voices to the call for compassion and justice. Now we are encouraging Christians around the world to join the Race.

Labels: AIDS, education