An Inspiring Evening with Canon Gideon (click for full story)

(Canon Gideon with friends. Photos provided by Alison Williams, John Whitley)

July 2008

Canon Gideon Byamugisha is a man whose ministry on HIV and AIDS has inspired people around the world. He is in the UK now to speak to bishops and their spouses at the Lambeth Conference, where his topic will be The Crucial Witness: The Response of Church Leaders to HIV Stigma and Discrimination.

For many years, Canon Gideon has worked with Oxford-based charity "Strategies for Hope,"  which produces materials focused on community-based approaches to HIV prevention, care and support, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. What Can I Do?, a SFH book and video based on Canon Gideon's experiences as the first African priest to disclose his HIV+ status, has helped to transform attitudes towards those living with HIV in many countries. Canon Gideon is also linked to Oxford through the long-standing support of his work in Uganda by many local contributors to the Friends of Canon Gideon Foundation's Hope Institute.

Last Tuesday, Canon Gideon updated local friends and supporters on the directions his ministry is taking, and some of the continued challenges faced by people working on HIV and AIDS-related areas.

Two themes stood out: the need to help young people affected by HIV and AIDS to flourish, and the need to combat stigma.

The plight of young people who have lost their parents to AIDS is close to Canon Gideon's heart. For this reason, he and his wife look after numerous orphan children, to the point that he jokes, "If you come to my home, you may think you have entered a primary school!" 

In addition, the Friends of Canon Gideon Foundation, which he and his wife founded several years ago, provides funding for older children to receive vocational training that will provide them with livelihoods in the future. Supported by contributions from many sources (if you would like to contribute, contact CCOW for more information), it graduated 30 children in 2007 and currently sponsors 80 children on vocational courses.

The programme has changed over the past few years: in the past, it brought students to the Hope Institute for Transformational Leadership and Development, where there were courses in tailoring, catering and bricklaying. But this restricted participation to local youth, and there were many who wanted qualifications which the Hope Institute could not offer. Canon Gideon came to the realisation that "what Ugandans are lacking is not courses, what they are lacking is money to get into the courses." Instead of bringing students to the Institute, therefore, the Foundation now offers grants that youth can use to apply to the courses that they feel best fitted to undertake, whatever and wherever those courses may be. Students are taking up diverse subjects -- as well as the traditional ones, there are pupils doing work in electrical engineering, plumbing, motor vehicle maintenance . . . "things they feel they treasure, and . . . will be marketable when they graduate." 

On the question of fighting stigma, Canon Gideon noted quite simply "stigma kills." A huge percentage of those infected by HIV, he said, do not know their status. The reason is "not because they lack testing services, but because they do not want to find out." "Why," he asked, "do people fear to test . . . and to disclose?" It is because of the stigma of AIDS. That stigma springs from many sources: a fear of contagion, the idea that being positive is an immediate death sentence, an association with promiscuity and immorality, a distrust of the medicines that can help to counteract the virus.

Tackling that stigma involves working at a variety of levels. Individually, Canon Gideon will accompany people to testing centres and teach them skills to deal with a positive test result. Within the community, he runs workshops so that "people understand that a person with HIV can mix very well" and shouldn't be isolated. Within the wider African context, because help was needed to fight "stigma towards a religious leader who is positive, [which] is twice or thrice as much [as the norm]," Canon Gideon was the founding chair of ANERELA+,  the African Network of Religious Leaders Living with or Personally Affected by HIV and AIDS. ANERELA+'s mission is "to equip, empower and engage Religious Leaders living with or personally affected by HIV and AIDS to live positively and openly as agents of hope and change in their faith communities and countries" 

At a global level, Canon Gideon is working to promote new ways of talking about AIDS that help to reduce stigma, and to make people aware that AIDS "is a collective problem that involves the family and the nation and the global community." In particular, he is concerned that the long-used "ABC" model of prevention -- the letters standing for "Abstain. Be faithful. If necessary, Condomise" -- has unintentionally helped to promote stigma, suggesting that where one is infected, it is because of promiscuity or infidelity.  By contrast, he notes, "[infection] could have been from blood; it could have been from injections." Indeed, it could have been from relationships within the context of fidelity; in some countries, marriage is a risk factor for women. To reduce the risk of stigma, therefore, ANERELA+ is promoting a formula for prevention known as "SAVE": Safe(r) practices, Access to treatment and nutrition, Voluntary testing and counselling, and Empowerment. 

During his talk, Canon Gideon reflected on the moment when he discovered that he was HIV+. Long-laid plans were destroyed, as support faded away. "People," Canon Gideon reflects, "are so stigmatised. I made a pact with God that I would join the AIDS fight for the remaining part of my life to share that stigma kills and share [my] story." Seventeen years on, he invites all to join in, quoting the words of a popular Ugandan song: "Today is me; tomorrow is someone else . . . it's you and me, we've got to stand up and fight. . . ."