NEWS FROM
LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF
November 26, 2003
In this news release:
- For World AIDS Day:
$5 Billion Phone Calls and 31 Reasons for Hope
- A Pastor A Week: Churches Pay High Price For Standing Against Colombia's Violence
For more information contact Jonathan Frerichs at (410) 230-2800.
FOR WORLD AIDS DAY: $5 BILLION PHONE CALLS AND 31 REASONS FOR HOPE
Baltimore, November 26, 2003 – New reasons for hope—31 of them—plus phone calls to seek billions in aid are World AIDS Day highlights for Lutheran World Relief this December 1st .
The 31 reasons are the number of church leaders in Africa equipped to start new AIDS projects in the past year.
The phone calls are part of a World AIDS Day call-in asking the White House to fund its promise of $5.4 billion for AIDS.
In a year when the AIDS pandemic climbed sharply higher on the agenda of Africa's churches, LWR took 31 church decision-makers and opinion-leaders from 12 countries on intensive visits to successful AIDS projects and partnerships LWR has in Kenya and Uganda. The leaders catalogued dozens of ‘best practices' during the visit and began individual action plans for their own churches as part of the training.
“The participants saw that certain churches are mobilized for H.I.V./AIDS from top to bottom, are working well with other groups in society, and are advocating for change in government policies, in media content, and in village courts that rule on matters like inheritance for widowed women,” said LWR East Africa director, Asenath Omwega, whose office led the trips.
“One of the things that moved the church leaders the most was seeing people who are living with the AIDS virus intervene to protect those who are free of H.I.V.,” reported Omwega, who is based in Nairobi. They realized that AIDS widows and H.I.V.-positive people are potential partners in their own churches' programs, she said. The same goes for AIDS orphans—of whom there are now 13 million in Africa.
The visitors recorded 46 ‘best practices' at LWR projects. The list includes churches that tithe in order to support AIDS activities during a special week, month or year.
World AIDS Day this year at LWR is also a time to recall big promises made here in the U.S. LWR is asking supporters to call the White House December 1 st to urge that the Administration keep its promise to Africa and commit $5.4 billion for curbing AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in 2005. [See http://www.lwr.org/advocacy/africa/aids.aspl for details.] LWR has also signed on to letters from faith-based organizations asking the White House and the U.S. Treasury Department to fund the fight against AIDS with both the $5.4 billion and debt cancellations for impoverished nations suffering the pandemic.
“Lack of dollars is the single most inhibiting factor” in the global fight against AIDS, Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special AIDS envoy noted recently. There are successful projects and programs across Africa but, Lewis said, “the frustration lies in our inability to take them to scale.”
In general, churches have not been in the forefront of the struggle against AIDS in Africa despite their proximity to large numbers of the people affected. This World AIDS Day comes after a year that has seen substantial shifts in attention and policies among Protestant, Roman Catholic and African independent churches.
The mostly Lutheran leaders on the LWR tours saw clearly the negative impact of denial and stigmatization, Omwega noted, and gained new understanding of AIDS as a complex societal crisis that is much bigger than a deadly individual disease.
The leaders also saw inter-faith AIDS projects of LWR. These projects stress concerns that unite religious groups, treat differences with respect, and make inventories of the assets that each faith group can offer for joint AIDS initiatives.
LWR's AIDS projects—and the ‘best practices' they offer—are funded by donations from Lutheran parishes and individuals in the U.S., including gifts to a special, three-year Stand With Africa campaign in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.
Two years ago on World AIDS Day, LWR and its grassroots AIDS projects were featured in the launch of a new initiative by the United States Agency for International Development to fund church-related programs in Africa. However, grants through the initiative, Communities Responding to the H.I.V./AIDS Epidemic, have still not materialized.
A PASTOR A WEEK: CHURCHES PAY HIGH PRICE FOR STANDING AGAINST COLOMBIA'S VIOLENCE
Baltimore, November 26, 2003 – Pastors and parish leaders are being killed at the rate of one per week so far this year and churches are being forced to close at the rate of nearly
one per day, according to a Lutheran World Relief monitoring team just returned from the South American country of Colombia.
“Those most actively involved in breaking the cycle of violence in Colombia are people of faith,” said LWR Vice President Cherri Waters, “and they are paying a high price.”
Some 50 pastors and parish leaders have been killed and more than 300 churches closed this year, an LWR partner organization, Justapaz, reported to the team. The group documents human rights violations affecting Protestant churches in Colombia.
The casualties and closures happen in communities that organize themselves to deal with the problems resulting from Colombia's civil war. The team visited one such place where LWR supports a community that is part of a movement to establish ‘sanctuary churches for peace.'
“These parishes are surrounded by armed actors—paramilitary groups, government forces, or guerilla fighters—but they start dialogues with the killers in order to co-exist,” said team member Kim Krasevac-Szekely, Latin America director for LWR. “Somehow they find the courage to convince the armed groups to stop killings and kidnappings, and bargain for farmers to go out to their fields and work.”
LWR's program for Colombia supports local organizations there to assist people displaced by the conflict, teach conflict resolution and establish local peace initiatives, such as the sanctuary churches. It also engages U.S. Lutherans to advocate for changes in U.S. policy toward Colombia, which emphasizes military and anti-narcotics measures.
A leading military expert in Colombia told the team that Colombia's nearly 50-year-old war would not be concluded by military means. He said that under Plan Colombia the U.S. government is spending $1.7 million per day on an unwinnable war.
The U.S. funding would be far more productive used as an incentive for land reform, he said, in order to address one of the root causes of the conflict there. Colombia is currently the fourth largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.
Also, the team heard repeatedly that money from the narcotics trade, which reportedly benefits all the armed parties, makes the conflict “self-financing.”
Non-military measures, advocated by NGOs and church groups in Colombia including LWR, are to address the causes of civilian displacement while providing much more aid to those already displaced, some three million in number, and to eradicate the coca crop by hand instead of by aerial spraying. The impoverished farmers who grow it now need adequate incentives to switch to viable, alternative crops. These measures would require a substantial shift in the current allocation of U.S. aid funds.
Dr. Vincent Peters, a college professor in Minnesota and LWR board member, led the monitoring team. The group visited non-governmental organizations and government.
