Local duo goes ‘Face to Face’ with AIDS orphans in Africa
by stacey palevsky, staff writer
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In the 1980s, journalist Ruthann Richter spent countless hours in San Francisco hospital rooms interviewing AIDS patients during the early days of the epidemic.
But even those often unsettling encounters could not prepare her for what she’d see years later in African orphanages.
“The number of people who continue to die in Africa because drugs are not available or affordable is staggering,” said Richter, a Palo Alto resident.
“Here [in the United States], we have the medication to save lives. It’s infuriating to see a woman [with AIDS in Africa] and know she will die a needless death and leave behind four children.”
The book is a sad yet hopeful photographic tour of how Kenya has dealt with children whose parents have died of AIDS.
It’s a subject that “there is astonishingly little information about” in the United States, said Richter, a longtime medical writer and member of Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto.
“Children get left behind because they’re not in people’s consciousness,” she added.
Apropos of its title, “Face to Face” introduces readers to children orphaned by AIDS — with detailed narratives and arresting photographs.
The book shows a generation of children who end up living on the streets, in an orphanage or, if they’re lucky, with their grandparents.
As depressing as that sounds, the book also contains some cause for optimism. A number of nonprofits have sprung up to address the needs of these children, and “Face to Face” documents several orphanages, schools and pharmacies that reach out to and empower these young victims.
For instance, in a small Kenyan town 35 miles east of Nairobi, a community school at Mama Darlene’s Children Centre has been providing an education to vulnerable, poor or disabled children since 1996.
For example, Richter and Ande met one young orphan whose mother and father, both stricken by the disease, were afraid of being seen at an HIV clinic. Their shame prevented them from seeking help early in the disease’s progression, and they ended up dead.
Mama Darlene’s Children Center also runs a goat program. Similar to Heifer International, it provides poor families with a dairy goat that generates both food and income.
Three years ago, Richter and her congregation, Kol Emeth, raised $10,000 for the goat project. Ande engaged her Methodist church in similar activism and fundraising.
“To this day people ask me how the goats are doing,” Richter said.
Richter also arranged for a Kenyan priest, Father Kiriti, to visit Kol Emeth and deliver a d’var torah to the congregation on Shabbat in 2007 and again in 2008.
He spoke about his village, Naivasha, and the challenges AIDS has created for the community. In “Face to Face,” he is quoted as saying that “a week without a funeral is a good week.”
“It’s not often that an African priest speaks at a shul,” Richter said. “It was the first time he had been in a synagogue, and he told me he was quite impressed. The congregation also seemed quite taken with him.”
The topic of AIDS and children in Africa will return to Kol Emeth when Richter and Ande give a presentation there Sunday, Nov. 22, one of four local appearances they’ll be making between now and Dec. 10.
One thing they’ll point out: that a donation of only $25 will buy a child a uniform so they can go to school.
“It doesn’t take that much to help,” Ande said.
Ande, a physical therapist who lives in San Francisco, began photographing children orphaned by parents who died of AIDS in 2000.
She and her husband initially traveled to Kenya on an environmental science expedition, but on their third trip, they ended up at an orphanage.
“I was totally captivated by these children,” Ande said.
More than that, she became distraught when she heard their stories — “how some wandered the streets, looking for their mothers, very upset. And then someone would find the mother in a pile of bodies at the morgue.”
When she returned home and began to process her film, Ande watched as the photos of the orphans’ faces developed in the darkroom. Moreover, she knew immediately that she had to take action — by raising money, by taking more photographs and by taking her friend, Richter, on her next trip.
“It can get kind of depressing, but if you stay in a disempowered place, you’ll never make any difference,” Ande said. “So I had to get beyond my emotional reaction, because it wouldn’t help the kids one bit if I’d stayed there.”
Both women were motivated, in part, by their anger — they have watched HIV become a manageable disease in the United States, and yet in most of Africa, drugs are either too expensive or otherwise inaccessible.
Because she works as the director of media relations at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Richter said it was especially difficult for her to deal with the fact that a mother could die simply because she didn’t have access to medication. She called it “infuriating.”
Yet collaborating with Ande on “Face to Face” has been encouraging, she said. Richter is moved by how her congregation has mobilized to help, and how her teenage daughter has also taken up the cause.
“My daughter has come to realize that there is another world beyond her own — a very, very different world —and that she can do something that will have an impact,” Richter said. “I think it’s important to plant that seed at a young age.”
“Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa” by Karen Ande and Ruthann Richter (121 pages, Hope Publishing House, $39.95)
Ruthann Richter and Karen Ande will give an author presentation at 11:15 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 22, at Congregation Kol Emeth, 4175 Manuela Ave., Palo Alto. Other local appearances listed at http://www.facetofaceafrica.com.
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