Strength of Africa

"The strength of Africa lies in its people" - my mother
At first I brushed it off...especially looking around. Failed infrastructures.. Poverty, diseases, death by the masses, civil wars...crooks (governments especially)...yea, i could really see the strengh..(NOT)...but I was 15 then..and I thought I knew everything...(part of me still has that all-knowing thought once in a while)...
So am finishing the pep on HIV/AIDS, and am seeing my mother's wisdom. Should have listened to her...with all her degrees...dat should be worth something.

I find that the top ten states with the highest AIDS prevalence rates are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Only Angola is of exception to the fact that states in this region have prevalence of 10% and above. 10% of the world lives here but 60% of the world's population with HIV is in this region. Of the top ten countries with the highest prevalence, nine of them are found in the Southern region. With the population of southern Africa, this means that half of them are infected with Aids.
With this population dying, about 15 million children are orphaned. UNAIDS reports that, by 2006 about 40% were living with AIDS, 4 million of those were new infections and there were about 3 million deaths due to AIDS worldwide. More than two-thirds of this population with HIV and about 80% of the deaths were in the Sub-Saharan Africa. Obviously, this has become more than a social issue and has transformed into an economic and a political issue with this amount of people dying per year. In his article, HIV Epidemic Reconstructing Africa's Population, Lester Brown "[2000] Began with 24 million African infected with the virus. In the Absence of a medical miracle, nearly all will die before 2010. Each day, 6,000 African dies from AIDS. Each day, an additional 11,000 are infected." If there is no continual and serious battle against this disease, the African population will decrease gradually with some countries more affected than others.

after being robbed of their land and resources, the Africans discovered that they can only rely on each other...not even the international community could save them...because they do not understand them...
So they figured that they can only rely on themselves. No theories, no expensive equipments...no programs could teach them to care. To take care of their own.
The stigma has got to go, because it has become an invisible tool to the dying population. After all, AIDS is neither a curse from God nor a punishment...and no one really deserves to be afflicted by the disease.