Last night at dinner in the dining halls, students donated meals, points, and cash to a hospice thousands of miles away in a province of South Africa. The African Student Organization (ASO) sponsored this semester's Cause Dinner, which allowed students to help solve the African AIDS crisis.
Every semester, Dining Services and the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate choose an organization to sponsor the Cause Dinner. Sophomore Melinda Coolidge, the chair of the Senate's Services Committee, said that the group picked the ASO's proposal in place of other possibilities including Tufts Association of South Asians'(TASA) earthquake relief fund, VISIONS meal delivery program to Boston patients with HIV, and an engineering fraternity that hoped to support the Christopher Reeve Fund, which donates money to researching spinal cord injuries.
The committee chose the AIDS in Africa cause because they felt that the issue is neglected.
"Basically, all the groups that applied were incredibly well-suited to receive the Cause Dinner. I believe the reason we came to a consensus on the ASO was [that] the raging AIDS epidemic in Africa [is] so under-funded," Coolidge said. "The other causes we felt were more funded than this one."
This semester, the ASO put its time and energy into the fight against AIDS in Africa because of its prominence in the news. According to the World Health Organization, over two-thirds of all people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 83 percent of the world's AIDS deaths. Of children living with HIV, an estimated 87 percent live in Africa.
To shed light on this growing health crisis, Time magazine ran a spread on Feb. 12, entitled "Death Stalks a Continent," which the ASO addressed in one of its first meetings of the semester.
The ASO president, junior Carl Nee-Kofi Mould-Millman, said that the organization is using the Cause Dinner to spread awareness as well as raise money.
"Our Cause Dinner is two-fold," he said. "We are trying, on one hand, to raise awareness of several issues to people on campus and secondly, we are trying to actually make a difference by helping to support our cause, that helps with AIDS in Africa."
According to the group, the KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa has one of the world's highest populations of people living with AIDS. "It's one of the hardest hit [areas] in the whole continent, thereby being one of the hardest hit areas in the world," said sophomore Akua Apraku, ASO's public relations officer.
ASO contacted Dr. Tony Moll, who runs a 350-bed clinic in this province that was featured in the Time article. Instead of money, Moll asked the group to send supplies, including clothing, medicines, and bed-sheets.
The group plans to use the money raised yesterday to purchase the requested supplies, and then ship them to Moll's clinic. In the meantime, ASO is working to find the most cost efficient way to ship the items to Africa. "That would be the most expensive cost - actually shipping the supplies there," Apraku said.
In choosing this specific issue to apply for the Cause Dinner, Apraku wanted to bring publicity to the African AIDS pandemic. "It's been a rising issue in the world but I personally feel it hasn't been addressed," she said. "[ASO] feels as if even though it's an epidemic, people aren't paying attention to it."
According to Mould-Millman, the statistics alone don't attract public attention. "To most people, they're just numbers, but to us, they're actual individuals," he said, adding that ASO's goal is to "bring a face to African issues on the Tufts campus."
