Essay

Unleashing the power of one

As a third-year student comes to learn, an individual can make a real difference in the fight against AIDS.

When I tell people that I’m doing research on AIDS in Africa, they tend to approve of what I do but pity me for doing it. These days, almost anything related to AIDS is rubber-stamped with importance, the very letters of the word boldly capitalized on magazine covers and front pages day after day. The press, however, invariably infuses its coverage of AIDS with a rhetoric of devastation, of doom, of impotence. A vaccine is still years away and it seems as though the combination of poverty, gender inequality and despotic governments makes the epidemic nearly impossible to combat. Thus, the pity lacing the approval does not surprise me. Every day when I think about the problem, I feel much as I do on Election...

Read more...