The AIDS Summit in Toronto calls out to us as a positive thing for a bunch of reasons. In this business you lose too many gay friends to HIV/AIDS – beautiful, talented friends, and it's not fair. But the conference also reminds us that in October 2004, we had the unique honour of filming a community schools program in rural Zambia on behalf of CARE Canada. We shot for six days, moving between one program west of Lusaka and another in the Mphande Hills.
We learned a lot about the devastation of HIV/AIDS. We saw child-led families, grandparents overburdened with eight, ten children to care for. People in Zambia are dying from simply loving each other like they have for millennia. Dying because they don't have access to basic education and health information, delivered with dignity and without strings attached.
And almost two years later, we feel a profound longing to return, and a huge amount of affection for the beauty of the Zambian people.
Two key lessons. Lesson One – kids just want to have fun.
One day we set up along the side of a road outside Lusaka where people living in the hulks of burned-out trucks pound white quartz into gravel-sized pieces and sell it by the bag for miniscule amounts of money. This scene was a stark reminder of social imbalance and poverty and what can happen when people don't have access to education. However, within seconds of setting up the camera, a group of about twenty kids appeared around the corner of one of the trucks, perhaps fifty feet away. They pointed, they posed, they waved, and within thirty seconds of rolling tape, one kid, perhaps four years old, turned around and mooned the crew. A celebration of the universal spirit of kids… hacking around.
Lesson Two – What you see is not what is there.
Within a half-hour of Lusaka, you are in the Africa that has existed for thousands of years. In October, it is dry, dusty, and seems desolate – no rain since March, and still some time away from the next rainy season. Simple adobe compounds seem heartbreakingly poor… until you began to notice how spic and span everything is. Until you see the patterns in the dirt from the work of matchstick brooms wielded by house-proud people. Until you are given a tour by an elder. If you really look, you can see that the dry, cracked dirt area has a pattern to it, and is actually a maize garden lying dormant in the Zambian version of winter. Everything has a place, a reason, a purpose. Once you learn that, it's beautiful in its simplicity.
We must restore AIDS/HIV to the public consciousness. And we must help Africa. Take a minute. Watch this Care Connects Video on the effect of AIDS in Zambia. Then visit a site like CARE or one of the others. Invest what you'd spend on a moderate dinner out for two people. And plan a trip to Africa - it will change you.
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2009-11-20: "Don't Play Games" - Motorcycle Ride for Dad Prostate Awareness TV PSA
2008-04-07: HyperActive on location - Mars!
2007-06-04: CSA - My Body In Space, Video Podcasts 1-4
2007-05-28: CFIC - Retention Toolkit
2007-03-27: Words of Wisdom
2007-03-12: Some things you can't learn in a classroom
2006-09-19: CANJAC Award Presented to Yellow House
2006-08-15: MikeBlog: Meanwhile in Africa...
2006-06-30: MikeBlog: Keep Your Forks, There's Pie!!!
2006-06-15: HyperNews: Helping Teachers Understand Autism
2006-06-13: HyperNews: Canada Career Consortium
2006-06-06: MikeBlog: To Pay or Not to Pay
2005-09-29: HyperNews: Childrens Wish Foundation of Canada
2005-09-05: HyperNews: Department of National Defense
2005-06-29: HyperNews: Department of Justice
2005-03-29: HyperNews: FINTRAC
2004-10-29: HyperNews: CAREconnects.ca, CARE Canada
2004-10-06: HyperNews: Stock Collection Zambia
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