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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
"Pray for me. But advise me to take my medicine". Paving the way with faith and medication through a life with HIV/AIDS
| Panel |
15. Reconfiguring the Religion-HIV/AIDS connection: challenges and opportunities
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| Paper ID | 444 |
| Author(s) |
Joergensen, Line Diemer Lyng
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Richard is a schoolteacher and soldier as well as a client and volunteer at the local HIV/AIDS project Reach Out, from where he gets ART. Richard belongs to a local Evangelical church and as a strong believer he interprets most life events within a Biblical framework. His church considers taking medication as “a failure of faith” but Richard’s first hand experience with the benefits of the medication and the affiliation with Reach Out has led him to make his own interpretations of the different authorities.
This paper shows how faith is actively used as a motivation for responsibility and hope in the face of a HIV/AIDS diagnosis. The point of departure is Richard, a client at the Catholic run HIV/AIDS project Reach Out in Kampala, Uganda, providing free testing, medication, counselling, food and micro loans to its clients, supporting them in living positively. The volunteers call this package A Second Chance and A New Life. The paper is based on three months fieldwork at Reach Out in 2005.
Two, potentially conflicting, resources for improving life with HIV/AIDS are biomedical treatment and faith. During counselling at Reach Out and in the worldview of Richard these are closely interrelated in a tactic Richard calls action with faith, a unique synthesis of medication and Christian faith, which maintains the loyalty towards both. In presupposing a reciprocal relationship between God and humans this synthesis is a kind of collaborative coping: a coping mechanism, found beneficial for people in crisis, in which the divine is perceived and experienced as taking a direct interest in the life and health of the individual, in return requiring the person to live and behave according to the will of God.
The connection between the two spheres originates from God’s absolute authority: God has granted a second chance through ART. God is also frequently invoked in counselling sessions, as a way of relieving clients from thinking about death, as “only one person knows when you are going to die” (counsellor at Reach Out).
These local interpretations carry several important messages: Richard represents a way of believing in which the physical health of the individual takes on sacred value by being part of God’s plan, and inscribes the individual in the meta-narrative of the Christian world history. The relationship to God as both a radical, transcendent Other and as part of a reciprocal relationship with the individual is a potent resource, which nourish the ill person’s hope and sense of fundamental worth. In a context of stigma and exclusion collaborative coping paves the way for positively re-interpreting the diagnosis.
Regarding the connection between medication and faith, the spiritual legitimisation of medication is an innovative harmonisation of resources, which some authorities see as conflicting. The spiritual dimension of living positively is rarely discussed, but is in this case a fundamental element in the HIV/AIDS management of both individuals and organisations.
* (Richard, February 2005) |
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