Above: A typical rural South African mud hut, and a wild lion at Hlange National Park. Both pictures taken November 2008.----------------------------------------------------
When it comes to fighting the AIDS pandemic, I'd take lions over a witch doctor any day! I know I had commented on how spiritual the people in Africa are, but I wanted to take a few minutes to explain that comment even more.
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I spent a few months in Uganda, Africa when I was in college. It was then that I first encountered how open Africans are to the spiritual world. We would lay hands on the sick (just like the Bible commands) and they would be healed. I personally layed hands on and prayed for a man with yellow fever in a hospital. He was deathly ill, didn't speak English, had his family all around, and I prayed for him. As I commanded his body to be well in the name of Jesus, I felt a searing heat go through my body into his. He started talking wildly and his daughter translated for him saying, "hot, hot, he says it is very hot coming from your arms".... after we prayed for him we went around to many other people and prayed for them. Then we came back to him, he was sitting up in his hospital bed, with a huge smile on his face...the fever broken, and he asked if we would share about God and Jesus who just had healed him. This kind of thing happened over and over again during my 2 month stay in Uganda. But back in the States, and even in Thailand on another missions trip, I didn't encounter physical miracles nearly as much as when in Africa.
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Americans? Typically we are hesitant and downright unbelieving when it comes to spiritual things. Many Americans want to see scientific proof of anything before they will believe it. So what I want to help you see is that the mindset of the Africans I have run into is exactly opposite. They believe spiritual things over scientific...thus one of the problems we have in helping them fight the AIDS pandemic. We think we can show them scientific proof that the way they are living is killing them, yet they value spirit over that information and they'll go to the witch doctor instead of a medical doctor to find out the cause of their sickness.
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The witch doctor tells them that instead of having HIV for example, that maybe their uncle has put a curse on them. Then, in giving advice to get rid of the curse, they might tell them to go rape a virgin woman. Because they value the advice of the witch doctor over the medical doctor, we cannot fight this disease through scientific literature or sexual education alone. We must battle in the spirit by showing them that the advice of the witch doctor is not truth, but a deceptive lie designed by Satan himself, with the purpose of keeping them in bondage.
Now I recognize that you may or may not be a Christian if you are reading this.... if you are, you know what I'm talking about. If you aren't, I ask you to keep an open mind, because I can tell you first hand that science alone will not fix this problem.
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One of the reasons it is hard to tell someone that the witch doctor is not the "doctor" they should be going to is because there is true demonic manifestations that happen and the people believe they are good and right. For example, I talked with a pastor who counsels people daily and he said that it is a common occurance for a woman's dead husband to show up in bodily form in her hut at night, sleep with her, and then be gone in the morning. The "sign" that it really was her dead husband is that there is a snake in the hut in the morning.
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This doesn't fit in the typical unbelieving scientific American's mindset...it just doesn't compute. But in Africa, this is power (though it is demonic) that is shown through the witch doctor, and you aren't going to tell that woman that her husband didn't appear. She believes it, and will therefore take the witch doctor's word over the medical doctor's, and there again, science means nothing to these people when they have seen the witch doctor's 'magic' work in front of their own eyes. And here, Satan has created a way to keep people in bondage and to keep them dying from AIDS/HIV.
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The power of God and the freedom from spiritual bondage has to be used as one way to combat the AIDS/HIV pandemic. More later.
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