Rachel Amandson

Do you see orange? No, I'm not talking about the cover of last week's Falcon, but rather last week's annual AIDS awareness campaign in which participants wore bright orange shirts with the word "ORPHAN" spread across their chest and the Acting on Aids website on the back.

Each person wearing the shirt represented a statistic of children orphaned by AIDS. Monday, one out of every 20 wore a shirt to represent the current 15 million children orphaned by AIDS. Wednesday represented the projected number of orphans in five years. Friday 10 out of every 20 students wore the shirts, representing the percentage of orphans if no action is taken against the spread of AIDS.

New additions to the campaign this year included a walk-a-thon on Saturday, a fundraising night at the Q Cafˇ and the sale of bracelets made by AIDS orphans for $20 donations. There were also several special guest speakers throughout the week. Some of you may have also noticed the statues of people eternally waiting for the bus in Fremont were also decked out in the orange shirts, a nice addition.

With all this awareness of AIDS going around campus, I began to wonder what students' perceptions of the pandemic were, since AIDS is often a touchy and even taboo topic in Christian circles. So, I began to do some informal anonymous interviews while working Wednesday night, and continued throughout the week.

The first person I talked to had what I would consider a fairly common perception of the disease among conservative Christians, a view that I will called sheltered and uninformed. The gentlemen I spoke with believed that he wasn't always sympathetic towards people with AIDS because they brought it upon themselves -- that is there were certain situations in which it could have been prevented, but it wasn't, so in a sense, they deserved it. To go a step further, I have also heard it said, by Christians mind you, that anyone with AIDS deserves it.

Well, do I have a response for that line of thought. All too often people live sheltered lives in which they do not always get the full truth about somewhat controversial topics such as AIDS. They are handed down their parent's beliefs, which in the AIDS case are often limited to homosexuals, intravenous drug users and the sexually promiscuous. These people are all in the "sin group," and AIDS is the consequence of their decisions and actions. God still loves them, and God can heal them, but they've acquired irreparable penalties. Nowhere to be found is the phrase "AIDS victim."

People with AIDS have often been stigmatized by the Christian community, but SPU is trying to change that with its AIDS awareness campaign. It focuses on the thought of AIDS victims -- that is, they don't deserve to have the disease, they didn't do anything to acquire it, but because of social customs and lack of knowledge and resources they did, and we as the Christian community, especially in the wealthy West, need to do something to stop the suffering caused by the spread of AIDS.

I said to my friends that held that stereotypical conservative belief about AIDS -- let's talk about Africa for a minute, where in countries such as Swaziland and Botswana an estimated one out of every three people is infected with HIV/AIDS (www.avert.org).

Tell me, how is it a woman's fault if it's part of the social structure for her to have intercourse with whoever her husband tells her to, and so she contracts AIDS, her husband contracts AIDS and they both die, leaving six or seven children orphaned by AIDS? Or what about the belief commonly held in African countries such as Tanzania that having sex with a virgin can cure the disease, and so AIDS propitiates again. How about people who are just uneducated; they don't know how to prevent it by using condoms or abstinence because they don't know how it's spread. Is it their fault for contracting AIDS?

Of the 15 million children orphaned by AIDS in the world currently, over 80 percent -- 12.3 million -- live in sub-Saharan Africa as of 2004 (www.avert.org). On Friday, approximately one out of every ten SPU students donned an orange tee to represent the astonishing 50 million children projected to be orphaned by AIDS in ten years if nothing is done to stop the pandemic, according to Jackie Yoshimuro and James Pedrick of Acting on Aids, the student and alumnus-led organization

All I'm really saying here is don't be afraid to explore what you believe about AIDS. Don't just adopt your parent's, the church's, SPU's or even my beliefs. The AIDS pandemic is a very real and prevalent issue in today's society, one that needs to be addressed by the world, but particularly the Christian community.

This is one area that I think SPU is doing truly awesome work in.

"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress ..." (James 1:27).