http://www.neverendingfood.org/
In industrialized countries, we often take longevity and health for granted. When something opposes this notion, it is easy to feel threatened. In a country like Malawi, however, concepts like these are not a given. Death is as much a part of daily life as is birth. Villagers are barraged by continual threats to their existence: Cerebral Malaria, Cholera, Tuberculosis, malnutrition, floods and droughts. In the eyes of the village, HIV infection is another disease to add to this list. The sense of urgency that we expected to find in a country that is one of the hardest hit in the world by this epidemic is minimal, even at the national level.
The conclusion that Stacia and I came to was that we couldn’t treat HIV as a separate entity. It had to be seen in the way that the village sees it–as part of a whole. We couldn’t address a disease that attacks the immune system without addressing the fact that immune systems were already compromised by malnutrition. We couldn’t work on improving nutrition without working to improve the diversity of what was being produced. We couldn’t improve the diversity of agriculture without working to improve soil fertility, and on and on….We began to see a natural connection between problems and solutions.