Posted on 05/11/2005 6:03:11 AM PDT by murphE
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras (Reuters) - With his mother long dead and his father off with a new family, nobody comes to visit Carlos, 27, as he sits blinded by AIDS and awaiting death in a charity hospice.
His father, who left him alone to care for his grandmother until she died, won't let him near his home, mistakenly believing he will infect his family by sharing their toilet, Carlos explains, the hurt spilling out of his sightless eyes.
Typical of the kind of Honduran now catching the virus, the boyish-faced former factory worker is neither sexually promiscuous nor an intravenous drug user. He caught HIV from a steady girlfriend who got it from a former lover.
Faced with one of the fastest-growing AIDS epidemics in the Western Hemisphere, church volunteers in this desperately poor Catholic nation are turning their backs on the Vatican's anti-condom stance, which is being upheld by new conservative Pope Benedict.
"It's a minor sin," says Wendy Guerra, head of "Program Open Door" in the sweaty city of San Pedro Sula. Hers is one of an army of Catholic-run AIDS prevention programs in tiny Honduras, home to some 60 percent of Central America's AIDS cases.
"As a Catholic charity we can't hand out condoms but we give advice about them and make sure people know where to get them," said Catherine O'Leary, a British nurse who runs the San Jose Hospice which took in Carlos when an AIDS-related disease blinded him.
A bustling industrial city that sprung up with the banana industry a century ago, San Pedro Sula crawls with prostitutes after dusk, thanks to a handful of nearby ports, and has so many HIV carriers it is dubbed Central America's AIDS capital.
With its chronic poverty, sprawling sex industry, violent crime gangs and macho culture, Honduras has been an easy breeding ground for the virus. Some 70,000 Hondurans are living with HIV/AIDS, nearly 2 percent of the adult population.
Among gay men and sex workers, the HIV rate is 10 percent.
Aid groups say that with the virus now spreading fast among the general public, which is less informed about the risks than sex workers, education on AIDS prevention is urgent.
"The thing is to try and save lives, which is just as important as focusing on unborn lives," said Guerra, explaining why she quietly advises HIV carriers to use condoms.
HOUSEWIVES VULNERABLE
According to the United Nations, more than half of new HIV infections everywhere are in the 15-26 age range, with women most hit. In Honduras, where a married man without lovers is an oddity, 90 percent of newly infected women are housewives.
The widespread poverty in Honduras means few have access to healthcare and there is no social network for AIDS sufferers.
Rita, 45, sits on her bed at the San Jose hospice clutching a cancerous growth that covers most of her face and groaning with pain. She has nowhere else to go, with one son in jail, one dead of AIDS, another emigrated and no close family.
She could have caught HIV from her ex-husband's wanderings, or like countless women here she may have been forced through poverty to trade sex for food, shelter or services.
"We don't ask about their pasts; we're not here to judge," says O'Leary. "But often you're talking about young people who've just had a couple of sexual experiences, or women so poor they use sex as a means of bartering."
With women so vulnerable in poor nations, AIDS prevention groups in Central America say promoting condoms is not enough.
"Our global message is ABC: Abstinence, be faithful and condom use, but for many Honduran women abstinence is not an option. Their partners aren't faithful and they are powerless to demand they use a condom," said Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund, on a visit to Honduras.
"We need to build their characters and self-worth to be able to say no and invest in female prevention methods like female condoms."
ABSTINENCE OR PROTECTION
Even if they caught on, female condoms would go against the Catholic church, which has held sway in Honduras and Latin America since Europeans invaded five centuries ago.
Some 85 percent of Hondurans are Catholic, and many were rooting for their liberal, poverty-fighting Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga to become Pope last month.
In a tiny chapel at the San Jose hospice stands a wooden cross completely covered with the handwritten names of the roughly 500 people that have died there, almost all of AIDS.
While life is almost bearable in the sunny grass courtyard with O'Leary's cheery presence, the patients here now may have been spared their death sentences with the right precautions.
"Priests can make a big difference on issues like this. Nobody wants the church to change, but when you work in this field common sense prevails," O'Leary said.
"You can't tell people not to have sex, so you have to teach them to protect themselves. The condom issue is about what you use them for. Anything that might stop one person getting AIDS has to help."
Sure enough, the original headline doesn't have the quotation marks.
Nice touch.
These helpers are doing Christ's work. God bless them.
I remain befuddled at the Church's stance on condoms.
ping
Among gay men and sex workers,
^^^^^^^^^^^
whats a "sex worker"? Is that the new politically correct term for whore? Are we now glamorizing that?
That term also struck me. I don't know if they are glamorizing it so much as trying to equate it with "farm worker", "factory worker", "computer industry worker", etc.
Why not make every attempt to educate a lesson in chastity? Forget about the condoms. The sick, sinful culture (every married man has many lovers) of these people has brought this scourge upon them. The liberals say let's not treat the source of the illness, let's encourage one of the symptoms.
Now take poor Carlos, for instance. How are condoms going to help him? He is, first of all, unmarried. He should not be having relations with anyone. Second of all, he is sick. He should not be having relations with anyone, whether he is married or not.
I meant to direct my reply #12 to you. Sorry.
Keep up the good work spreading truth. There's so much error, and so little time.
"In Honduras, where a married man without lovers is an oddity...."
The wages of sin is DEATH - for themselves and their spouses.
Condoms are no solution for a society which lacks the basic virtue of marital fidelity, they will only make it worse. Condoms will simply prolong the epidemic which will only be over when all the adulterers, fornicators and homosexuals are dead.
I thoroughly reject the Catholics' extra-biblical doctrines on contraception, but putting the quotes in the title makes sense to me. Those who are promoting things condemned by the Catholic church are no more Catholic than I am.
Condoms will spread the disease as it will lower the inhibition to have sex. Then, as sexual activity outside of marriage increases, the incidents where people skip the condom will increase. Condoms did not stop AIDS among homosexuals in America..it is still raging. Condoms will not stop genital warts which is raging like wild fire through America's youth.
Abstinence...abstinence...abstinence that is the only way to beat Satan.
Be careful there, Tantumergo. We're all sinners. This kind of talk comes perilously close to saying people with this dreadful disease deserve it. While true the plague of HIV is spread through sin, it does not mean the folks who have it deserve it, nor that every person who contracts it has themselves sinned in acquiring it.
Come now. This is Reuters, not EWTN.
Do you also reject the Catholic church's very biblical stance on extra-marital sex? You have swallowed the article's spin, you've been suckered by the article, which is a propaganda piece for contraception. The spin occurs when it claims Carlos is just a nice, decent guy, innocent victim because he had sex only with a steady girlfriend. The article presupposes that sex with a steady girlfirend is equivalent to marital fidelity, hence only those who are sleeping around with a dozen partners are really wrong and culpable for getting AIDS. Can't you see what you've swallowed? This article is premised on the acceptability of "moderate" extra-marital sex as compared to "immoderate" or "extreme" extra-marital sex. And what makes "moderate" extra-marital sex moral, in this author's view (which reflects the mainstream today)? One should be able to get away with extra-marital sex with a single, steady partner if one uses contraception.
Why did you fall for this article's spin when, ten-to-one, you do not in fact endorse extra-marital sex at all? (Correct me if you do indeed think that extra-marital sex is okay as long as one is faithful to one's boyfriend or girlfriend, more or less.)
Why did you fall for the spin? Because you were already prejudiced against the Catholic position on contraception. You know that Catholics alone reject contraception whereas Evangelicals and Catholics oppose abortion. In your view, I would bet, abortion is obviously "biblical" and to be opposed (even though the Bible is no more explicit about abortion than it is about contraception--the unanimous tradition of the Church from the very beginning is opposed to abortion and contraception, based on interpretation of what the Bible does say about sex, procreation, and killing of innocents). Correct me if you belief that abortion is permissible.
The Catholic Church on contraception is not unbliblical. It differs from your intepretation of the Bible. When will you finally get it that there is no such thing as the simple, obvious, self-evident "Biblical" view on anything. If there were, Christians would not be divided into thousands of denominations.
But, unless I'm mistaken, you've probably decided that the Bible is clear about abortion but not clear about contraception. You are entitled to your interpretation. But please recognize that it is an interpretation and that the Catholic teaching is also an interpretation and the debate is over which interpretation the truest, not over which is self-evidently "biblical" and which is "extra-biblical".
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