Some GAIA trustees and a few friends traveled with me to Malawi in June. Our purposes were to participate in a GAIA funded training conference for Malawi clergy on stigma reduction and support of women, to visit resourceful village projects, and to meet with the staff of the women's empowerment project being supported by the Gates Foundation. Here are just a few gleanings from the trip:

Working with clergy At the training conference one young man tells his discussion group that his wife died 2 years earlier -- he witnessed her "terrible death." He was tested for HIV and learned of his positive status. His CD4 count is presently 84, indicating that his immune system is severely compromised. The children are 2 and 10 years old and he is frightened about land-grabbing. (In Malawi there are no effective restraints against the seizure of one's land after a death.) A person of few words, he softly asks, "What will happen to my children?" "Who will they become?"

Another time, in a plenary session, a silence falls over the room when one of the clergy asks, "How do you answer the question, 'Where is God when I am infected?'" His colleagues try to respond: "We ask God to assist us. We ask others in this group to assist us. We need to assist each other in such things."

At the end the conferees organize themselves by geographical region for mutual support, mutual action plan implementation, and for effective accountability. I feel we achieved results we hadn't dared to hope for.

In the field Our entourage visits a rural hospital about 60 km from Lilongwe and comes upon a 35-year old woman with spontaneous uterine bleeding. Her baby had been delivered dead the day before. The woman is still in the delivery room, her hemoglobin count below 16. No husband is in sight, there are 4 living children, and she is close to death. Does anyone have the woman's blood type? One of our party does. The blood is donated.

Another day we visit an orphan care program begun by a young man in a very impoverished area. He had been motivated to develop his program when he witnessed a young mother who died in childbirth, and then the death of her baby, who died because there was no food in the village for it. Mother and infant were buried in the same grave. This man's own mother had been an orphan. They began with 200 orphans, and now they serve about 2000, providing the kids with old clothes, food, and tutoring. There are 10 paid staff and 50 volunteers in this well-run program.

At another orphan care program we see 800 children receiving their one balanced meal per week. Our chief staff in Malawi - a Malawi man -- remarks, "People with HIV/AIDS suffer over a long time and exhaust their resources, then die, leaving their children with nothing. This is the worst part."

Finally, but by no means least We meet with the 5 women leading our women's empowerment project in more than 25 villages in southern Malawi. They are smart, dedicated, competent. The most urgent help we can give them - but we have to find the funding -- is motorbikes, enabling them to serve the 5 to 8 scattered villages for which each is responsible. Here they will reach orphans, youth, women highly susceptible to HIV infection, and organize around a number of HIV prevention, care, income-generating, and nutrition and food security strategies.

I return to the U.S. stunned yet again by the need, the opportunities, and the brave and resourceful people of this deeply impoverished and gentle, hospitable country.

William Rankin (Wrankin@thegaia.org) GAIA web site (www.thegaia.org)