Dear Lord,

Let the true nature of your love dominate who I am so that wherever I go I may make your love known to those whose lives are changed by AIDS.

Help me emerge from my ignorance about HIV/AIDS to overcome my fears. May I suspend my judgment of those with AIDS and learn to accept them as they are. Grant that I may help them overcome their fear, embarrassment, and guilt. Enable me to come close to them, support them, and lead them to the cross. They need me, and your grace is all I have.

In Christ's righteousness,

Samuel Malama

Samuel wrote this prayer after a home-based care visit. As an expression of God's love to those with AIDS, we have introduced a program called Peer Educators. The objective is to create an awareness of AIDS issues among youth, ages 6-24, and show them how to reach the AIDS community with Jesus as their Source of hope and joy.

For practical experience, we arranged a visit to a home-based care ministry in Lusaka, Zambia. We wanted the Peer Educators to see what AIDS looks like "on the ground" and to see its effect on a family and the community at large. Our thought was, "How can they passionately fight something if it is just a theory to them?" We asked them to write about their experience, what they saw, how they felt, and how it changed their attitudes.

Their expectations were much the same: "I expected my visit to be dramatic and overwhelming. I thought we would see skeletons of people with disgusting things on their bodies. I anticipated it would push me to realize the impact of AIDS on the Zambian community, to compel me to take a test, and to ruin my entire day.

"But I didn't see any skeletons or anything unusual on anyone's body, and my day was not ruined. It did change the way I look and think about AIDS. I now see AIDS, not only as a disease of the body's immune system as we so simply explain it, but also as a disease of the soul and the emotions. AIDS not only affects the body, but also the heart. I saw precious souls that know rejection and hearts sunk to the depths of depression. I wanted to take them by the hand and show them the happiness and joy found only in the Lord; to take them to Him and let them know there is hope, and things will be all right in the end."

Another of our Peer Educators wrote: "In the midst of what seems like a catastrophe to me, there emerge some people who are living with AIDS. Their lives focus on surviving, growing, and beginning, not on deteriorating, fading, and ending. They are living with AIDS, not dying of AIDS."

All of us saw the reality of this horrible pandemic. It opened our eyes to the stigmatization and discrimination threatening them at every turn. For fear of being rejected, many AIDS sufferers have not even told their family members and spouses that they are HIV-positive.

The saying, "Even if you're not infected, you're affected," made so much sense after this visit to the AIDS compound.

For more information about SIM's comprehensive response to the AIDS crisis, visit Hope for AIDS.