Patients outside an HIV/AIDS treatment clinic in Zimbabwe, where native Zimbabwean Lilian Dube, USF assistant professor of theology and religious studies and director and co-chair of the African studies minor program travels, regularly travels to deliver vitamins and volunteer.
It's World AIDS Day 2009 and a dozen University of San
Francisco students are bundling boxes of multivitamins to be shipped to
Zimbabwe, where the disease afflicts more than 15 percent of the country’s
population.
Throughout last summer and fall, more than $2,100 worth of
multivitamins and cash donations were collected on campus by students, staff,
and faculty working on the part of USF’s Health Promotional Services department
and the African studies program. VitalCare, as the vitamin drive is called,
first expanded to USF in fall 2008 after Dr. Robert Scott, the founder of
Oakland-based Allen Temple AIDS Ministry, spoke on campus.
Scott, who passed away in October, was on campus speaking to
students about his experience leading volunteers to Zimbabwe for the past 10
years. In Zimbabwe, Scott’s team distributed anti-retroviral medication, worked
to educate the public on HIV/AIDS, and distributed vitamins to bolster
patients’ ability to fight HIV/AIDS with improved nutritional health. Touched
by Scott’s description of the ministry’s efforts, USF students decided to do
what they could by collecting vitamins for the cause.
“The vitamins play a vital role in helping to keep the patients healthy
especially since there is often not enough food or medication for those with
HIV/AIDS in Africa,” said Kyrstin Thorson, a junior international studies major
who is also among a growing number of African studies minors.
“Students, including many from the African studies minor
program and Umthombo Club, as well as staff and faculty from Health Promotion
Services and University Ministry, coordinated the vitamin drive for a second
year in 2009, collecting bottles of pills and repacking them for patients in
Africa,” said Lilian Dube, assistant professor of theology and religious
studies and director and co-chair of the African studies minor program.
Dube, who is teaching a newly designed course about theology
in HIV/AIDS contexts and is leading a first-time HIV/AIDS service-learning and
study abroad trip to Zambia this summer for USF students, knows firsthand the
impact of HIV/AIDS on Africans. A Zimbawean and member of Allen Temple AIDS
Ministry, Dube worked in AIDS clinics in her native country last January,
calling the experience “life changing.”
“AIDS is a global pandemic,” said Dube, who will travel home
to work in AIDS clinics again this January. “It’s a poverty issue, a gender
issue, and therefore it is a justice and theological issue.”
Dube believes that allowing USF students to witness the
socio-economic consequences of HIV/AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa will spark them to
action and community organizing to support nonprofits and faith-based
organizations waging the fight against HIV/AIDS, if not abroad, then back in
the Bay Area.
“I am extremely excited to actually experience the HIV/AIDS
crisis in Africa, instead of just reading about it,” said Thorson, who, as part
of the trip, will be traveling to varies parts of the country and assisting in
clinics.
Witnessing the crisis will be a foundation for USF students
to begin to critically analyze the economic political, cultural, religious, and
gender factors as causes and solutions to Africa’s problems, Dube said.
