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Eight
members of our team divided into four teams and spent the morning doing
home visits for families with HIV/AIDS. Their homes consisted primarily
of 2 small rooms with no bathroom facilities. The SIM (Serving in Missions)
program provides lodging, food, medical attention and medicine for those
who have HIV/AIDS and sign up. Many of its participants are women whose
husbands died of AIDS and left them and their children destitute. The
wives have contracted HIV/AIDS from their husbands and may have passed
it to their children. This program allows the wives to avoid commercial
sex as a means of support for themselves and their children. For some
it turned their lives one hundred eighty degrees which they thank God
for. Most of the families were Christian and the teams had devotionals
and prayer at the end of each visit.
Each
of the four teams visited with three or four families and treated each
of the family members with medical problems. These problems varied from
warts to genital herpes. One young couple both had HIV/AIDS and the wife
was six months pregnant. Both were concerned that their unborn child not
develop HIV/AIDS during the delivery or breast feeding. Time was spent
with them on their individual treatment and advice given as to the unborn.
Another family had a seventeen year old boy who was recently released
from prison following his arrest at a political rally. He had difficulty
sleeping and other problems which suggested post traumatic stress disorder
for which advice was given.
This
afternoon, all eleven in the team went to the Ethiopia National Museum
located here in Addis Ababa. It presented Ethiopia from an historical
perspective and had thrones and clothing of various monarchs as well as
pottery from before Christ's birth. For the evolutionists the bones of
"Lucy" had her own room. It is alledged that she is the missing
link between man and ape, being 3.4 million years old, three and a half
feet tall, weighing sixty pounds, stood erect but had an ape sized brain.
She was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia.

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