JANELLE STRAWSBURG
Staff Writer
Steve Haas, vice president of Church Relations within World Vision, traveled from Seattle to Pepperdine Tuesday, Jan. 17, to discuss the impact of AIDS on the world and to inspire students to take action through a special convocation offered for students by You and I for the Universe (YIFTU) in conjuncture with the Week of Peace, Hope and Justice sponsored by Amnesty International.
Haas said he distinctly remembers the moment in his life where AIDS was transformed from a mere statistic into a fierce reality.
“A co-worker asked me to imagine if a 747 plane with 420 passengers crashed and everyone in the plane died,” he said, “This allegory automatically grabbed my attention because it was just months after 9/11, when I had been living in Washington, D.C. Then he asked me to imagine if eight planes crashed every day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, then to multiply that number by 15. This is how many people have died from AIDS. Now that was a statistic that hit home.”
Senior Wondirad Assefa Tsegaye, president of YIFTU, worked to bring Haas to campus to share with students his experience with AIDS and how World Vision is seeking to battle the pandemic.
“We hosted the convocation to bring awareness to students and to get students involved so that they will become a part of the fight against AIDS/HIV,” he said.
Haas leads World Vision’s partnership with churches to embrace the religious communities’ responsibility to serve the poor worldwide. Haas’ specialty is to share how God’s word calls Christians to respond to orphans, widows and the suffering of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
“AIDS is the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time, and ours is the most marked generation in the world,” Haas said. “The church has always been the one to bring life, if we rise to the crisis of AIDS it will be the biggest apologetic the world has ever seen.”
Partners in battling the AIDS pandemic are desperately needed. Currently, 70 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS. Since its identification in the 1980s an estimated 30 million people have died. Every year alone 3 to 4 million people die. One of the worst effects of AIDS is the rapidly growing number of children who are orphaned after the death of their parents because of the HIV infection. More than 15 million children are orphans because of AIDS.
World Vision’s first goal is to aid orphans and underprivileged children around the world, many of who are victims of the effects of AIDS.
“World vision is child-focused,” Haas said. “We build a sustainable kingdom for kids.”
Deborah Whang, senior president of Amnesty International, aid she also believes in the importance of children in social justice.
“So often in dealing with global issues, it’s the children that get left out of the picture,” she said.
In his talk Tuesday, Haas continually stressed the importance of awareness of the global impact of AIDS.
“We, in America, have a very different perspective of the AIDS pandemic than the rest of the world,” he said, “We see Magic Johnson, and say, ‘He looks fine to me, how big of a problem is there anyway?’ But he’s actually on about 30 to 40 pills a day, while most of these international cases have never seen one anti-AIDS pill.”
One of the most important and essential ways to battle the AIDS pandemic, Haas said, is to involve the Christian community in the fight.
“One of the biggest misconceptions within the Christian sphere is that most people associate AIDS with risky behavior, and globally that is not true,” he said. “Sixty percent of the individuals infected with AIDS in Africa are women who were faithful to their husbands. We can’t try to blanket the issue with just one filter.”
The church’s call to love is the greatest reason for its involvement in the fight against AIDS, Haas said.
“The world is waiting for the relevancy of the Christian church, and this is the opportunity,” he said. “James 1:27 says ‘Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress’ and this is what we are called to do.”
Haas finished the afternoon by giving students three ways to help fight AIDS.
“The first is information, be informed about what is going on,” he said. “Secondly, prayer, be praying for those infected, for the church and for world leaders. And thirdly, activity, God’s given us tremendous resources, now put them to work.”
The Week of Peace, Hope and Justice’s main goal is focused on promoting awareness, advocacy and action throughout the community, according to Amnesty International.
“AIDS is the most serious problem in the history of the world,” said Assefa Tsegaye. “As Christians we are responsible to act, to love. That is our mission right?”
01-19-2006