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Gaborone, Botswana
Finding hope in the midst of AIDS crisis in Botswana


With up to 20 per cent of its total population of under two million infected with HIV (an estimated 38 per cent of adults age 15–49), with tens of thousands of children orphaned by AIDS every year, there is no question this disease will profoundly affect Botswana for decades to come.

“I’m very passionate about the need for ongoing counselling [for people with AIDS]”, says Ruth Thiessen, a worker with Mennonite Ministries Botswana, a joint effort of Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission and Mennonite Central Committee. “If someone tests HIV-negative, the challenge is to work with them on how they can live responsibly and be safe. If they test positive, it’s how to live well [with what they have left].”

Art and Ruth Thiessen have served off and on with MCC since 1973, in Lesotho, Zambia, British Columbia and previously in Botswana. They are members of Bakerview Mennonite Brethren Church in Abbotsford, B.C. They began their current term 18 months ago in Lobatse, Botswana, at the Tsholofelo Counseling Centre but immediately were connected to the Botswana Christian AIDS Intervention Program through a BOCAIP counselling course. Now both work in the Gaborone offices of BOCAIP, Art as financial controller and business manager, Ruth as project officer for public relations and fundraising.

BOCAIP’s main thrust is on placing counselling centres around the country, as well as training Christian counsellors using a curriculum that has been developed over the four years of BOCAIP’s existence.

The Thiessens know first-hand how necessary support for the grieving is. In 1996, they lost their 23-year-old son Brad to cancer. Ruth’s direct experience working with those affected by AIDS started when she was an AIDS worker, doing education with constituency and support for people with AIDS, with MCC B.C. 1991–99. And as early as 1987, they saw it in Zambia, in the father of the best friend of one of their sons.

The stories of hardship and suffering seem endless, she says. “There are the orphans, the relatives unwilling or unable to care for them, the men who vanish leaving the woman to be blamed when she gets sick and to be kicked out of her house with no job and no way to feed her children. There is the grandmother caring for dozens of children at a time when she was expecting her grown children to care for them, but they are dying.”

But still Ruth has hope.

“I find [hope] when I hear of someone deciding not to commit suicide or of [an extended] family caring for its orphan children well. I see it in the old, white haired moruti (pastor) who had a vision for [a counselling centre]. I see it in another old moruti in Lobatse, who visited regularly in the hospital’s Cubicle 1 – for terminally ill women with AIDS – to lovingly and gently pray with the patients. This man could have been sitting at home, but he is committed to this ministry despite his own failing health.

“I find hope in the fact that the church is beginning to respond, even if not as well or as widely as it could and should. The church is opening its ears to the real story. This is a disease of women – who become infected younger and more easily because men prey on them – and children and heterosexual men.

“We can’t close our ears in the church because [AIDS in Africa] is a disease of sexual transmission [and we don’t like to talk about that]. We have to look with compassion on those who are suffering. That’s what Jesus did.”

 – adapted from a report by Melanie Zuercher

Responding to the call

Edward Baralemwa is the director of the Botswana Christian AIDS Intervention Program. Based in Gaborone, Botswana, BOCAIP has developed a curriculum for training volunteer Christian counsellors and is working to start counselling centres around the country particularly to minister to people infected or affected by AIDS. Baralemwa is a native of Uganda, one of the few countries in sub-Saharan Africa that has managed to turn the tide of the AIDS pandemic. In 1996, the Botswana government asked him to help design a Christian response to AIDS, recognizing that in heavily Christian Botswana, the church represented possibly the most effective and efficient grassroots network available to help combat HIV and AIDS. In addition to training dozens of volunteer counsellors, BOCAIP has started centres in nine locations around the country. The centres also facilitate support groups for people with AIDS, provide educational outreach to the community with a special emphasis on youth, provide orphan day care, and supply some direct material aid such as food, blankets and money for school fees and uniforms. Anglican from birth, Baralemwa studied at seminary. He saw drinking, smoking and sex outside of marriage as “the main sins”, he said. Gradually, however, he underwent a transformation from “a judgmental attitude toward people with AIDS all the way to bitterness with God. I began to see [seminary and ministry] colleagues dying starting in 1989. “I had many questions God didn’t answer. But I gradually came to peace with it.” He went from full-time church ministry in the early 1990s, he says, because “the church wasn’t responding to AIDS the way I thought it should. I thought I could do more outside the church. “I have been a ‘deacon’ – a servant – in this work ever since. God has shaped and used the ministry.”  – adapted from a report by Melanie Zuercher

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Last modified October 29, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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