Life's work inspires moving 'Odyssey'

Life's work inspires moving 'Odyssey'
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

Read Original Article on USA Today
She's not a famous actress like Angelina Jolie or an iconic rock star
like Bono, but journalist and writer Melissa Fay Greene hopes she can
help focus more attention on AIDS in Africa.

Greene's book, There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to
Rescue Africa's Children (Bloomsbury, $25.95), tells the true story of
Haregewoin Teferra, an Ethiopian woman who has cared for hundreds of
orphans in Addis Ababa. Greene weaves in the history of Africa's AIDS
pandemic from its infancy to the present. Twenty-five million people
have HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

"I'm not an epidemiologist or a demographer or a billionaire," says
Greene, who says she wanted her book to put a face on Ethiopia's
people and show how AIDS has shaped their lives.

There Is No Me is not without its joyous moments. Greene writes about
"the beautiful, giggling and healthy children" in some orphanages. She
also writes of adopting two Ethiopian orphans; two more will join her
family this fall.

"No matter how humanitarian it all appears, it's really about a happy
household and enjoying the children," says Greene, who, with her
husband, Don Samuel, also has four birth children and a daughter from
Bulgaria. They live in Atlanta.

A two-time National Book Award finalist, Greene, 53, hopes her book
will encourage more Americans to donate to organizations that care for
orphans and struggle to provide HIV/AIDS treatments to the afflicted.
There are 12 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, and many more
who have lost parents to war and famine.

"For every child adopted, here are 10,000 who aren't," Greene says.
She estimates 400 Ethiopian children have been adopted by American
families over the past few years. The most famous of these adoptive
parents is Jolie.

Greene has high praise for Jolie and U2's Bono for the work they have
done to publicize Africa's pressing problems. She won't name names,
but she is critical of celebrities who, she says, "are using AIDS
orphans as a backdrop."

"Bono has been a tremendous force for good. Angelina Jolie is becoming
a big giver to the orphans of Ethiopia in honor of her own daughter,"
she says.

But adoption, Greene says, is not the answer to Africa's problems.

"The answer is to stop generating orphans and get the funding and the
medicine necessary to keep a whole generation alive," Greene says.

Greene sits on the board of the Worldwide Orphans Foundation, founded
by Jane Aronson, the pediatrician who helped care for Jolie's
Ethiopian daughter, Zahara. The foundation focuses on the medical and
emotional needs of the world's orphans.

The situation in African orphanages is especially critical, Greene
says. "At some of these orphanages, the children are all HIV-positive
and are going to die. And why are there are no middle-school-age
children in these orphanages? They are all dead."

To learn about the foundation, visit orphandoctor.com.

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