Why Do We Need an African March of Millions?
Severe hunger, grinding poverty, sexual abuse, childhood disease and psychological abuse are burdens no child should ever have to experience. Yet the on-going sexual victimization of infants, children and young women in the countries of Southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, etc.) and elsewhere, has reached epidemic proportions. What factors are contributing to this abhorrent tragedy?
With the AIDS crisis touching the lives of one-in-three persons in South Africa, traditional tribal Natural Healers sometimes promote what is called the ‘virgin rape myth’, an ancient, and misguided belief that having sex with a virgin will cure a man of sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV/AIDS. Thus, through ignorance, thousands of young victims are brutally mistreated, and their lives and minds are scarred and damaged forever.
These crimes continue to be perpetrated against young girls in South Africa and elsewhere. For each tender young human life, the consequences can cascade into a lifetime of constant fear, and physical and emotional ruin. The innocent are cast out of a rigid social system, unable to marry, maintain normal relationships, or bear children of their own. Most victims suffer in silence, never able to comprehend the reasons for their ostracism and suffering. Constant fear, rejection, and psychological humiliation of this sort threaten even the fabric of democracy itself in these regions.
South Africa’s future relies on finding ways to help these children. Across Southern Africa, a horrific combination of sexual abuse, lack of basic needs, violence, disease and lack of education is tyrannizing young children, the future of Africa. The number of orphans, many HIV positive, is burgeoning as their parents die of AIDS or they are abandoned because their parents cannot afford to care for an HIV-positive infant.
Catherine Hyland’s vision, born of her own years in South Africa both as a resident and worker helping these very kinds of victims, is a very simple plea to meet those needs. By making available life’s basic necessities to these victimized children in South Africa and elsewhere, CIFKIDS can bring together cohesive forces of compassion, knowledge and volunteer labor in a real and effective way to find solutions that can end these devastating social challenges faced by the weakest, the poorest, and the most damaged. Short-term solutions, quick-fix band-aids, and grandiose expectations to solve all problems quickly, are not the goal. Instead, CIFKIDS will work with volunteers, collect funds and donations of goods and services, partner with other committed agencies and groups, administer real aid on-the-ground such as food, clothing and facilities, and show our Love in Action spirit wherever and however we can.
Choosing a more lasting course of change and transformation, the CIFKIDS Foundation will be working in South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and Botswana, to ease several key points of crisis. A high priority will be to fight the ignorance and occult despair propagated by the ‘virgin rape myth’. Africa is an ancient land of mysteries and tribal truths, but this misconception is indeed a grotesque and dangerous lie. Belief for whatever reason that relations with a very young virgin child will cure or heal any disease, much less AIDS, is baseless, false in every way, and completely lacking in acknowledgement of the needs and rights of the young under the United Nations-sponsored Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the charter document signed and agreed to by more than 100 nations. How do you fight a lie? Through public education, protest and dissent, informed rebuttal, meetings and discussions, CIFKIDS can and will shine the light of truth into the darkness to liberate both victim and perpetrator, until the lie is no more.
CIFKIDS calls upon all concerned global citizens to make a stand against the irreprehensible crimes being committed against children in countries of Southern Africa. Please support us in our mission to make a difference in the lives of these children, and thus the future of Southern Africa, by attending or supporting the African March of Millions scheduled for early October, 2008, in Cape Town, South Africa. Our Love in Action Concert will take place the day before the March. If your organization or corporation would like to become a sponsor for this groundbreaking, international event, please visit our Corporate Sponsors page to learn more about sponsorship needs and opportunities that are available.
If Catherine Hyland’s vision for the future of Southern Africa is your vision, please join with CIFKIDS in reaching out in simple and practical ways to alleviate suffering. Stand with us against the pain, the ignorance, the lies, and the poverty, that causes the little ones to hurt with a type of longing only they can truly know. If we can help one child live a happier and safer life, free from abject poverty and fear of rape, then both their world and ours will be brighter. Please take a stand against child rape by joining CIFKIDS for the African March of Millions in 2008, in Cape Town, South Africa. For "without a vision, the people perish."
