Africa

As part of a panel at Riverside Church on Sunday afternoon, Emmanuel Kamau of Nairobi, Kenya and others offered American audience members firsthand accounts highlighting the plight of gay and lesbian Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa. While several of the issues discussed resembled those faced by homosexuals in New York, the panelists stressed the problems unique to post-colonial Africa.

This past winter break, I was fortunate enough to travel to Ghana to learn about HIV/AIDS. I learned that although President George W. Bush has addressed the global pandemic of HIV and AIDS by appropriating an estimated $30 billion in AIDS relief, this legislation fails to address the reality of the people’s lives it is intended to help.

University President Lee Bollinger has said one of his top priorities is making Columbia a leading institution for the study of Africa. But Columbia’s decentralized initiatives regarding the continent, strewn throughout multiple schools, institutes, and departments with no central oversight, inhibit the University’s goals.

If you are poor, you walk: to school, to collect water, to find firewood, to go to town, to work, to farm your field, to get crops to your family, to get any excess crops you may grow to a market, to buy goods from the store, to get health care, to go to funerals.

Ten minutes into the 19-hour flight to South Africa, the knot fraying in my stomach told me I had made a mistake. The air thinned, my cheeks burned, and my head swelled and raced. I wanted nothing more than to go home.