Ubuntu, Sanyog, We are all the Same…from Sonya

Before I stepped onto South African soil for the first time, I mistakenly thought I would be entering unaccustomed earth: a culture, people, and priorities distant to the world I called home in northern India and the United States. Little did I realize that the native spiritual philosophies of ubuntu (an African ethic meaning “shared humanity”) and sanyog (a Hindi concept translated as “oneness”) that were taught to me on different corners of the earth simply and yet profoundly validated to me everything I needed to understand about the global HIV/AIDS crisis, about Keep A Child Alive’s efforts, and about our identity as humanitarians and as human beings. I began to understand that as our unique personal narratives and histories travel with us, we become intertwined with others in such a way that their problems become our urgent callings, that their bright destinies become our greatest hopes, that we are all the same. While traveling back and forth between the developed and developing worlds throughout my life, I inherently understood our interdependence on each other, but the connection I made between both spheres was rooted in our shared darkness. Doctors Without Borders physician Fady Joudah once said that more than 33 million individuals living with HIV/AIDS is a “number that cannot be ignored. These are people who define the other face of the mirror, the dark side that does not reflect us, or so we think.” Before this trip, I understood this to mean that we reflected each other with the darkness of poverty and despair on one side of the mirror and the darkness in our failure to respond to their suffering adequately on the other side. I also naively believed that among developing countries, we united by sharing an understanding of darkness stemming from government corruption, impoverishment, human rights abuses, and endless disease. Thus, I thought the greatest point of commonality between South Africa and my country of India was the notorious label of being among the most inequitable countries in the world. Just as South Africa’s makeshift townships comprised the backyard of the wealthiest city in Africa, Johannesburg, India was home to both the largest number of billionaires in Asia and also the highest number of malnourished children in the world. Just as South Africans experienced imperialism, enslavement, and apartheid due to British forces, so too had my people of India suffered under British power. I soon came to experience that the people of South Africa would dispel this notion and teach me that we are not connected by the shared darkness we have experienced, but by our communal light. The healing tree in Durban that Operation Bobbi Bear convenes, sings, dances, and prays under every Wednesday grows in the toughest of conditions and can only die when each one of its roots are destroyed. In the same symbolic truth, the national flower of India, the lotus, only grows its aromatic, stunning petals in muddy, shallow, murky waters. As Operation Bobbi Bear’s “child rights and HIV warriors” battled South Africa’s HIV/AIDS and child abuse epidemics with their inspiring words and peaceful resistance to police and local government apathy, I was immediately reminded of my country’s Satyagraha (“holding firmly to truth”) movement, as Gandhi and his freedom fighters equally risked imprisonment and harm in order to fight against exploitation and social injustice. The spiritual richness, the dreams recited by the children, and the unbound resilience despite the physical poverty in Soweto’s townships made me feel as if I was standing in the very slums and villages of my ancestral lands halfway across the globe. I soon learned that Keep A Child Alive’s efforts in India and Africa may reach different populations and address HIV/AIDS in a different sociopolitical context, but seek the same truth and push the world to answer the same question: How do we want future generations to look back on us, with awe or in shame? Two weeks before we journeyed to South Africa, the country’s president, Jacob Zuma, led a South African delegation on a state visit to India in order to explore the “vast untapped potential” between the two countries in terms of economic trade. Why should we stop at commercial markets? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Zuma, as Keep A Child Alive has demonstrated, India and South Africa are not only bound to each other by their fiscal futures, but by our shared vision in breaking down stigma due to HIV/AIDS, increasing access to ART treatment and care, and building sustainable, grassroots solutions to prevention and education. Too many times in the non-profit world, philanthropists sit in their air-conditioned offices in Geneva and Washington D.C., striving to solve the people’s problems in Africa and India. The most freeing element of this journey for me was witnessing how Keep A Child Alive breaks apart this model, and empowers local leaders such as Mum Carol and Rhona Buckley, as well as community-based institutions such as Ikageng Itireleng AIDS Ministry, to voice their needs and provide us with the solutions. This was another lesson for me in how we are all the same: on this journey, we all were teachers of service, students struggling with frustrating questions, and mentors to each other. It was a beautiful symphony of voices engaging in the struggle, the doctors of Blue Roof Clinic and the dreamers of justice, the rockstar and the researchers of truth, and the victims of HIV/AIDS and their families. Even deeper, we discovered that we were not the donors, they were. They donated their hearts, their minds, their time, and whatever little resources they had to us, the recipients of spiritual aid. They proved to us that the true donors were individuals such as a girl whose home we visited in a Soweto township. Her mother, who was HIV-positive and whose lungs were filled with TB, told us that chocolate was her daughter’s most prized possession. As we gave her a bag filled with chocolates, she immediately ran to her friends and judiciously distributed it to all the other children in the township, spreading smiles with her selflessness. In another instance, the two adolescent girls I befriended at Ikageng Itireleng AIDS Ministry, both of whom were HIV orphans, were more concerned as to why I was not already married and how to overcome my shyness of boys, and denied me of even worrying about their lives for a moment. At that moment, I realized that it is most often those with so much less who make the first move to offer something of themselves.

Khalil Gibran once said, “Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness.” This veil has not only obscured the faces who witness impoverishment and disease each day, but obscures our faces as well, because we are all the same. Whether mentoring high-risk female sex workers on the gritty streets of Southcentral Los Angeles, or listening to the stories of abandoned HIV-positive wives in the villages of central India, or now befriending HIV-affected orphans in South Africa, I have learned that a fight for the lives and dignity of HIV-infected individuals in one pocket of the globe is felt on the other side just as strongly. We must endow ourselves with the aspiration that we are superior to circumstance, that learning how to build the ideal HIV center, such as the Blue Roof Clinic, is not based on the expertise knowledge we possess, but on the questions we dare to ask of the local community, global village, and most importantly, of ourselves. We should only be so proud as to possess the same ancestral genome, same unrelenting hopes, and shared moral makeup as our brother in South Africa’s Agape Childcare Center or our sister receiving care from KCA’s Aanchal Care Home in Rajasthan, India. As the millennial generation, we are the most well-informed, multicultural, and visionary generation in human history, and also the most compassionate and ethical. Let us rise to our label. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” Let us restructure these edifices one by one until entire communities are founded on empowerment, justice, and dignity, rather than on charity and paternalism. Isaac, one of the most inspiring young men I met at Ikageng Itireleng AIDS Ministry in Soweto, emailed me some of his thoughts the other day, which I thought perfectly encompassed the encouragement we need in order to rise to our generation’s highest calling, internalizing the notion that our suffering is their suffering, and theirs ours: “The time is on our side, meaning we are running a race from God’s perspective and He is able to give us courage to keep the race of fulfilling our purpose. I’m a good student, I am God’s product, and therefore I am an optimistic being of God. For us to have a positive attitude we have to focus on what makes us happy, and when we are happy we feel good, and when we feel good we feel God in our midst.”

Love & blessings, Your African and Indian sister, Sonya