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Action Card - December 2007World AIDS Day is observed worldwide on 1 December. For information and action go to www.e-alliance.ch/hivaids.jsp
The Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance has a worship service for use on or near World AIDS Day or at other times when your church wants to focus on HIV and AIDS. It can be adapted to your own context. The service has a list of additional suggested hymns at the end of the liturgy and can be downloaded as a word document at
Leadership is the theme of this worship service. In the response to HIV and AIDS it is crucial that people in the churches choose to accept leadership where there is none and to strengthen people already leading in the HIV response whether nationally, in their cities and villages, and in the churches themselves. Loveless, the woman living with HIV pictured on your action card, was restored to life thanks to anti-retroviral treatment. Now she exercises leadership in her HIV peer group in local villages in northern Malawi.
PROCMURA
The Project for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa works among the churches in sub-Saharan Africa to enable mission as witness to the Gospel and peaceful co-existence with Muslims. These two aims are linked because to share God’s Word, Christians need to live according to kingdom values: making peace and hungering after justice. As Christians share the Gospel, its message must not be obscured by the quality of life of the Christian community. This means living the love of God as well as speaking of it.
Rev Angèle Dogbe is co-ordinator of PROCMURA’s HIV programme for women and tells of the impact the project has had:
1. Women of all religious communities understand that to win the fight against the AIDS pandemic, they need to take up the challenge and face it together despite their differences, putting aside misconceptions and misrepresentations of the other faith community.
2. Women see that when Christian and Muslim go together for an HIV awareness creation programme in a particular area, it is easy for women in that locality to join the fight, to go for voluntary HIV counselling and testing and to ask the team to meet with their husbands and explain to them the need of protection.
At the East and Southern Africa regional PROCMURA training conference Mrs. Kassam Jubeda represented the Muslim women of Malawi. She is the founder of the Ndoor women’s centre. When she founded it, Mrs. Kassam was doing home based care and taking care of orphans. After the training she received from PROCMURA, she has added women’s empowerment to her activities, by providing women in the area where she lives with skills to be able to start their own income-generating projects. At the centre itself, women are now learning farming skills and tailoring.
Please send your card with a message of encouragement to Rev Angèle Dogbe ( Postage 54p with air mail sticker) Women’s Co-ordinator Programme for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa (PROCMURA) PO Box 66099 – 00800 Westlands Nairobi Kenya
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