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She's not a famous actress like Angelina Jolie or an iconic rock star like Bono, but journalist and writer Melissa Fay Greene hopes she can help focus more attention on AIDS in Africa.
Greene's book, There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children (Bloomsbury, $25.95), tells the true story of Haregewoin Teferra, an Ethiopian woman who has cared for hundreds of orphans in Addis Ababa. Greene weaves in the history of Africa's AIDS pandemic from its infancy to the present. Twenty-five million people have HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
"I'm not an epidemiologist or a demographer or a billionaire," says Greene, who says she wanted her book to put a face on Ethiopia's people and show how AIDS has shaped their lives.
There Is No Me is not without its joyous moments. Greene writes about "the beautiful, giggling and healthy children" in some orphanages. She also writes of adopting two Ethiopian orphans; two more will join her family this fall.
"No matter how humanitarian it all appears, it's really about a happy household and enjoying the children," says Greene, who, with her husband, Don Samuel, also has four birth children and a daughter from Bulgaria. They live in Atlanta.
A two-time National Book Award finalist, Greene, 53, hopes her book will encourage more Americans to donate to organizations that care for orphans and struggle to provide HIV/AIDS treatments to the afflicted. There are 12 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, and many more who have lost parents to war and famine.
"For every child adopted, here are 10,000 who aren't," Greene says. She estimates 400 Ethiopian children have been adopted by American families over the past few years. The most famous of these adoptive parents is Jolie.
Greene has high praise for Jolie and U2's Bono for the work they have done to publicize Africa's pressing problems. She won't name names, but she is critical of celebrities who, she says, "are using AIDS orphans as a backdrop."
"Bono has been a tremendous force for good. Angelina Jolie is becoming a big giver to the orphans of Ethiopia in honor of her own daughter," she says.
But adoption, Greene says, is not the answer to Africa's problems.
"The answer is to stop generating orphans and get the funding and the medicine necessary to keep a whole generation alive," Greene says.
Greene sits on the board of the Worldwide Orphans Foundation, founded by Jane Aronson, the pediatrician who helped care for Jolie's Ethiopian daughter, Zahara. The foundation focuses on the medical and emotional needs of the world's orphans.
The situation in African orphanages is especially critical, Greene says. "At some of these orphanages, the children are all HIV-positive and are going to die. And why are there are no middle-school-age children in these orphanages? They are all dead."
To learn about the foundation, visit orphandoctor.com.
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