Connections (Johnny Payne)

The movie I Heart Huckabees contains two “existential investigators” played by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman, which seek to help their clients to make connections between all the events, persons, and circumstances in which they find themselves, in order to draw out underlying meanings, or spiritual truths we might say, about their own lives as well as more grandiose ones like the existence of the universe. Making connections allows the characters in the movie to view individual persons, events, and circumstances in a way they would not otherwise appreciate. For example, losing one’s job becomes an opportunity to rediscover a more fulfilling vocation, meet new friends which strengthen one’s self-awareness as well as providing distance from stagnant and discouraging colleagues.

This concept has been important to me in discerning how God is working in my life and how to minister more effectively to others. However, making connections is definitely not an exact science. For instance, Job and his friends spent a long time discussing the connection between his hardships and what God was doing and why He was doing it, all to no avail. When we reach the point of total confusion about the connection between our life and God’s plans, it is helpful to remember “[God’s] ways are not our ways”.

Connections which we have been experiencing the past two weeks in Zambia as a team have been many and have given us a lot of encouragement that God is present in what we are doing. For example, the dramas which the students (8th-9th graders) have come up with reveal the bleak reality which they face in their personal lives. Both girls and boys groups frequently, almost exclusively, portrayed the norm for young people in their community: boys, inspired by American hip hop videos, meeting up with girls, dressed “a la Rihanna”, and quickly preceding to have sex (this was inferred or referred to by the characters), without mention of HIV status or condoms. The pressure to follow in this behavior, despite the well known consequences (all characters tested HIV+), is more significant than most of us could appreciate from an outsider’s perspective. While the connection seems so obvious in the play, actually resisting the temptation to pursue such a relationship and to refuse sex is extremely difficult and very few teenagers are able to maintain abstinence until they are married. HIV infection statistics bear this out.

Some connections which need to be made are not being made. For example, answer the following based on your own experience or what you have read:

A. Does the knowledge of HIV differ between Christians and non-Christians? Testing rates? Percentage of singles who abstain from sex?

B. Has the presence of HIV been handled by the Church better or worse than the general public or other faiths?

C. Have our prevention efforts been based on a scriptural understanding of extending grace to the fallen and discipline to the non-repentant?

I believe the Church has overlooked the connection between who we are in Christ and what we do in the world and why we do it. Agape love is the unstoppable force with which Christ intends for us to overcome the darkness of the world, yet we fail to connect how this love should appear in our daily lives and especially how to love others which are not ready to love us in return.

The longer I work in the HIV education ministry the more consistently I find that people struggle to make connections between important things and are generally distracted by the unimportant. Many are eager to understand risks involved with using razors or condoms while they have never tested for HIV even once in their life. At one of the schools we are teaching at during this trip, 2 out of 20 teachers polled had ever received a formal training on HIV/AIDS (those two were lasted trained in 2006). While I became concerned that they needed training for their own sake as well as to share information with the students, I quickly reminded myself that knowing one’s HIV status would be far more important than knowing what HIV does to the immune system or most of the rest of our lessons’ content. Like most Africans, few teachers are willing to test for HIV, even fewer are willing amongst those who have a reason to believe they may test HIV+. Recently we offered HIV testing immediately following our Sunday morning service at my church in Mufulira, and only 16 out of 170 in attendance chose to test (2 were positive). Even in the US, the majority of those who are HIV+ have not tested since being infected, thus they are not aware that they may be transmitting it to others.

We have spent a lot of money on teaching people about transmission and prevention, on treatment, and other interventions like prevention of mother-child transmission, but few countries have attained a position in which a significant majority of citizens test regularly for HIV or in which those infected are aware of it. Likewise, only 3 countries have attained significant decreases in their HIV infection rates (and these may be easily reversed). This means the number who should be enrolled on ARVs is still far less than it could be if more tested and far less than it will be as epidemics become more connected by regional and global development. Already, we have concerns that treatment costs will not be manageable beyond the near future. Are we missing a serious connection between testing and prevention?

As we teach students about the reproductive system, sexual transmission of HIV, the immune system, and testing/treatment choices, we hope that both information as well as our encouragement and educational activities will give them the ability to make better connections between those truly important things, not only to prevent HIV transmission but to help them realize what God is doing in their lives and how they can reach their potential as children of God.