Do they hear you when you cry?

As the velvet night wraps its arms around the little hamlet of Siteki, high atop the emerald mountains of Swaziland, a young woman starts to cry.

Lying on a dirty blue plastic sheet outside her mud brick home. Her face pointed to a canopy of silver stars.

A steady rain of tears streaming down soft cheeks, as she remembers love...

Love that was born in fleeting looks and shy, school girl smiles. Love that opened its wings in wild laughter, a hand held tightly, a mouth kissed firmly.

Love that held her close through the forbidding night and promised a diamond dream of forever.

She remembers too, her little ones.

The four brown angels who drank life from her breast. The butterfly souls who danced her back to happiness when he hit her.

Who kept her heart beating, when Dokotelle said the words "I'm so sorry Googoo, you have AIDS."

She remembers the birth of her last child. Of the screaming pain that was soothed only by the balm of seeing those new born cheeks glowing with life.

During the birth a hole was made. "A fistula" they called it. That made waste ooze from everywhere. That made friends and neighbours flee.

And yet here, on this dying day... Surrounded as she was by her own urine and faeces. Able to feel every bone in a body that once burned with soft light.... Her tears were not for her.

They were for her children.

For who would look after them, when she was gone?

Who would kiss their forehead before they went to sleep. Who would feed them and wash them and tell them not to play too close to the fire.

As the night faded and the dawn broke a van arrived.

It was Kathleen, the kind American nurse from the Hospital near by. She knelt by her side and held her hand.

"Googoo, we will make sure your children will be taken care of." she whispered

And as she heard those words, the broken woman started to sing,

"Amazing Grace,

How sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind but now I see."

Kathleen and Googoo

The day she died



HIV/AIDS has taken more lives than the sum of all wars, all natural disasters, all diseases throughout the history of humanity.

2.8 million people like Googoo die every year of this senseless disease.

You and I can make a difference.

http://www.youngheroes.org.sz/

Sponsor an AIDS orphan.

Be their hope.

With love, Maithri

Two of Googoo's Children - ages 2 and 5

(AIDS orphans)