Never Give Up: Vignettes from Sub-saharan Africa in the Age of AIDS

by Kevin Winge

Never Give Up puts the AIDS pandemic into cultural context, raising questions about international health issues, cross-cultural experiences, racism, and homophobia. In his role as executive director of Open Arms of Minnesota, a nonprofit organization that provides meals and related services to people with HIV/AIDS, Kevin Winge shares his firsthand knowledge of the realities and challenges facing people living with the disease. While earning his master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Winge traveled to the townships outside of Cape Town, South Africa, where he lived and worked with AIDS workers for six months. He chronicled his daily activities by telling stories about the people he came in contact with, accounts that are included here. Emotional and highly personal, the lives and conditions depicted in Never Give Up are a strong call to action for all of us to respond to this devastating disease with compassion and determination.

Genres: Nonfiction, Africa

198 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2006

Reviews

[kavya · Rating 2 out of 5]

"How did they know that? Had they met with prostitutes and women and girls engaged in survival sex? Had they listened to them in forums where the women and girls themselves had identified self-esteem as their greatest issue? Did it ever occur to them that it's not just women and girls who are engaging in these activities? That South Africa has rent boys doing the same thing? More important, did these American academicians not think that South African social issues should have South African solutions, and maybe that our role as outsiders should be to assist with those efforts instead of exporting social intervention models from the United States?"

"The Reverend summed up our day: "You ask me what AIDS does to families. It destroys them. By the time they die, the family is finished. By the time they die, all that they worked for is gone. And if the family suffers, the community suffers. With the absence of food, they go very fast. No one in Guguletu can afford the drugs. There is no morphine at the end of life. There are pain tablets — aspirin. What destroys me as a pastor is that it's a very lonely death."

"An African friend had told me about a faith-based conference he attended at which one of the presenters warned his audience about creating dependencies by distributing free food to poor people. The presenter was concerned that occasionally giving poor, often sick people, food would rob them of their self-worth and extinguish any ambition they might at one time have harbored.

Following the presentation, a woman rose to ask the presenter if the banquets served at expensive conferences also created dependencies for middle-class and rich folks. She wondered if corporate cocktail parties and dinners had a similar effect on business people. Did their free meals diminish them as people and make them lazy employees? Why, she wondered, is it fitting for privileged people to receive free food and liquor, yet providing poor people and people with HIV/AIDS with enough food to ward off malnutrition and possibly starvation should be discouraged?"