Praying for our Cousins

When you spend time with many of the same people over the course of 20 years...they are family. That’s why we call the residents in the three townships we visit each year...our “cousins”.

Right now the entire globe is at the mercy of the COVID-19 Pandemic. We are. And they are. But the same virus is met by different realities...

In these apartheid-created impoverished townships there are no face masks...there is no hand sanitizer...there is no “Wash your hands for 20 seconds under hot soapy water”. (It wasn’t until recently that many people here got access to a shared spigot of water in the first place.) There is no “social distancing” when you live in a small round house or corrugated metal shack with no interior walls. 

We just received word of the first new confirmed “positive” COVID-19 cases in the Eastern Cape nearing two of our “family” townships.

Fighting the AIDS crisis is what brought Arm in Arm here in the first place 20 years ago. Many things have changed here since then—even more have not. Some health experts describe our medicines, our hygiene, and our in-home isolation as the only way to win the “war” against this powerful virus...If that analogy is appropriate, then we all need to pray for our “cousins” in South Africa who have no ammunition to defend themselves...