Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Just a couple of hour ago, i attended the awareness meeting for HIV and AID's globally. There was a speaker from the Catholic Relief Services to help explain it on the bigger picture and to give many statistics. it was a very eye opener meeting and educating me on all the new information.
CRS is funded by the US government and supplies care to millions of people all over the world. CRS drops food to places in desperate need and help them to plant crop that will last through disease and are long term. This is the first function that the CRS was started for. In 1981 they started providing care, prevention and treatment of HIV and AID's. They work with over two hundred partners in over 9 countries that are funded by the the UN. 
In the past few years the percentage of people getting HIV and AIDS has decreased a significant amount. The number of people not getting treatment has decrease "four-folded". Women are still the biggest percentage of the HIV and AID's carriers but that can easily be explained by them being more susceptible/ likely to catching it. Africa also is still the dominant area in desperate need for help and with the most agencies over there. 
At the end of the lecture, the speaker was telling us of what we could do and it reminded me of our jesuit education. being educated about other area's around the world and the problems troubling them is what we try to acquire in our jesuit education. She mentioned how we should be praying for them as often as possible because there are so many people with HIV and AID's that aren't able to receive help and the families and communities around them as well. It is our duty as catholics and students of the jesuit education, we should help send money to the CRS. At the least we could send letters to our congress to make sure that these agencies receive the money that has been promised to them by President Bush.

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