Stephen Lewis speech in Rio

Stephen Lewis gave a powerful speech to the scientists and experts gathered for the opening of the World Aids Conference in Rio on July 24.  Here's a bit ot:

Earlier this month, I was in Kenya, in a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, visiting a group of women living with AIDS, tending to large numbers of orphan children. As is always the case with a visitor, there was a little performance. In this instance, a handful of children came forward to sing a song of their own composition. It began with the words "see us, the children carrying our parents in their coffins to the grave", and it ended with the words "Help, Help. Help." And then from the crowd, there emerged a young girl of ten who, with the help of a translator, related the story of the death of her mother.

I have heard many such stories from many such children. But I have rarely been left in such emotional disarray. It became clear that the mother had died only a few days before, and this little morsel of a girl, as she talked of her mother's trips in and out of hospital, and then the last weeks at home, wept copiously, uncontrollably; but it was a weeping as if the depths of the sea had been plumbed; the tears didn't just flow, they gushed, they soaked her sweater and ran down her skirt, and for a moment in time, it was as if this one young girl became the pandemic incarnate.

Most of you in this room probably feel very distant from the orphans. You're not. Nothing in this pandemic works in a vacuum, or works in compartments. Everything is linked inextricably to everything else. That young girl is at the end of a continuum which starts with your scientific inquiry, and moves, inexorably, to her intense human anguish.

That's why I appeal to you to enter the fray as advocates. This is a good conference to summon those energies. We're meeting in Brazil, where the government has responded to the pandemic with astonishing enlightenment. Governments everywhere have to parallel the same enlightenment.

It's a Herculean task. But in this battle, no one is exempt: no government, no sector, no agency, no NGO, no part of civil society, no multilateral organization, no individual - no expert, no scientist, no public health professional. We can subdue this pandemic, but it will take the collective and uncompromising voices of principle and outrage to make it happen. It will, in other words, take your voices.

For the whole speech click here.  Thanks to cousin-in-law Peter Carver for sending this.

Comments

[Mike]

Thanks for the link. Very powerful.