World Aids Day 2008:Stop Aids Keep Your Promise
One major challenge to curtailing the spread of HIV, the virus which leads to AIDS is the breaking of promises. World leaders have been tardy in keeping their promises made back in 2001and as a result of being slow to act millions of lives have been lost. Each year the same promises are made, then they get broken in the light of supposedly more important aspects of national budgets.
It’s not only world leaders who are breaking their promises in relation to HIV/AIDS. Promise keeping is also concerned with fidelity or faithfulness to self, to partner/spouse and to those who are depending on you for support and care – i.e. your dependents who would suffer at your untimely death because you failed to keep your promises.
As the theme for this year says, Take The Lead. Stop Aids! Keep The Promise, I encourage you to keep your promises. And in the 3 stories below you can see what happens when you break your promise.
Samantha is now 30 years old and the mother of a beautiful little girl. 10 years ago she fell in love with the most wonderful guy. He treated her like a queen and swore she was his heartbeat. She believed him. They got married and he promised her that he’d be faithful to her. Their lovely wedding was only outdone by the joy of the birth of their daughter a year later.
A few months after the birth of her daughter she noticed her flu just wasn’t going away so she went to the doctor. He sent her to do a blood test. The results came back HIV positive. Susanne was suicidal for a while with plans of murder on her mind. Her husband died before she could kill him. She is still alive today. Living with HIV, aided by anti-retroviral medication she still does not have AIDS. A broken promise put her life at risk.
Tony was a quiet intelligent and dedicated guy. He had worked hard and now he was the manager in the hotel. Women, including guests at the hotel, always told him he was handsome. He was not short of attention. He was no saint, but he didn’t have time to be a player either. Moreover, he had his eye on the nice shy reservations clerk. She was a good girl who belonged to the same church his mother attended.
Tony started attending church more regularly. He wanted to get to know her much better. So they started talking. And they got closer and closer. She later went back to school and they were now discussing marriage. One day the hotel where Tony worked hosted a Health Fair for their staff as the management knew how tough it was for staff to get time off to attend to certain health matters. Moreover, persons are not that willing to get tested for HIV.
Testing for HIV was not mandatory, and Tony on his way home at the end of his shift decided to do the test out of curiosity. He knew he was safe. He was seeing one person so he had nothing to worry about. He picked up his results a week later and he was completely devastated. His results came back positive for HIV. Tony quit his job and no one has seen him since. A broken promise put his life at risk.
Miss Madge is 63 years old and a respectable member of her church. She was a hardworking woman who struggled hard to make ends meet when her husband Harry went away on ‘Farm Work’ as a seasonal worker on a farm in America. After this last trip Harry returned home and was very ill for sometime. He said he had caught a bad cold during the winter and it was taking a while to go away. A little warmth would take care of that cold in no time.
Being gone for so long naturally Miss Madge couldn’t deny him his “husbandly rights”. Protection never even entered her mind. She belonged to the old school of married women who don’t even know what ‘protection’ looked like, much less use any. Moreover, respectable married Christian women, especially at her age have no use for such things.
But Harry never got better and the doctor said it wasn’t just a cold. Harry had brought back AIDS from the US and he died from pneumonia. And the blood test the doctor sent Miss Madge to do came back positive. She didn’t understand half of what the doctor said to her, she believed only young careless people could get these kinds of things. Miss Madge didn’t believe in taking any medication. She died a year after Harry. A broken promise took her life.
As the old saying goes, A promise is a comfort to a fool. And that is how we’ve been treating promise keeping. We make promises so easily knowing that nobody believes us anyway. That is dangerous cynicism.
Heed the appeal this World AIDS Day and keep the promises you make to yourself and to your loved ones to be more sexually responsible. With each act of responsibility, you are saving your life and the life of others.
Peace,
Marvia
** The names of the characters in the stories are fictitious and any resemblance of these stories to someone you know is purely coincidental.
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December 1st, 2008 at 6:42 pm
[...] understand better than presenting a scholarly treatise on the subject. A couple days ago, I shared stories of Broken Promises and how by not keeping our promises we put our lives and the lives of others at [...]