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An Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best Book of 2006
2006-09-03
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Verdict: Illuminates an unseen side of the AIDS crisis.
The tragedy of AIDS in Ethiopia comes into sharp focus in Melissa Fay Greene's powerful new book, There Is No Me Without You. Greene, who lives with her family in Atlanta, tackles the terrifying truth that in 2005, Ethiopia counted among its population 1.5 million AIDS orphans. Officials estimate some 12 million children have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS in all of sub-Saharan Africa.
Stirred by such dire statistics, Greene wondered who was going to raise this lost generation of children.
"Although in the Western industrialized states HIV/AIDS has become a chronic condition rather than a death sentence," she writes, "in Africa a generation of parents, teachers, principals, physicians, nurses, professors, spiritual leaders, musicians, poets, bureaucrats, coaches, farmers, bankers, and business owners are being erased."
Greene shares the courageous yet complex story of Haregewoin Teferra, a foster-care provider in Addis Ababa. This woman on the frontlines, Greene writes, was "an ordinary citizen, a middle-class, middle-aged woman, who suddenly found herself toe-to-toe with the worst epidemic in history."
What motivates someone to start caring for the children and babies left in the streets? Teferra was driven by extreme grief — over the deaths of her husband and daughter — to consider entering monklike seclusion. As she contemplated that, the local Catholic charity director asked her to take in a 15-year-old orphan, then another orphan and another and another.
"She had believed that [the children] were offered to her as a balm," Greene writes. "In reaching out to others in pain, her own pain was lessened." Teferra depended on financial support from her family and friends and risked being shunned by her community. "The stigma of the plague crawled across its orphans, widows, and widowers, as if they, too, seethed with germs," Greene observes.
Greene doesn't simplify Teferra's story or portray the complex, flawed woman as a saint.
Greene, twice a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award (for Praying for Sheetrock in 1991 and The Temple Bombing in 1996) skillfully weaves the back story of the AIDS crisis among touching personal anecdotes, recounting the history of the disease, its impact in Africa, and the depressing divide between treatment available in Western industrialized nations and in Africa.
Her passion for getting treatment for the parents — and children who are infected with HIV/AIDS — is clear. As she writes of a boy named Mintesinot, whose father died of AIDS:
"In the calculations and spreadsheets of those empowered to alter the fate of Mintesinot's father Eskender ... Eskender was expendable.
"He had not been expendable to Mintesinot."
Greene, the mother of seven, ends the book with profiles of children who have been adopted into American homes. But she is careful to note that adoption isn't the sole answer. Getting treatment to the people who need it has to be a more urgent mission, she insists.
A fundamental truth — heartwarming and heartbreaking — underlies this passionate narrative: Every child needs a loving parent, and every mother needs a child.
"Haregewoin understood the children's mournful cries because she felt it, too," Greene writes, "the loneliness of all the years you still have to live without the people whom you need in order to live."
— Robin Michaelson, September 3, 2006
