We Are One: Part Two
Some years ago, in 2014, I started work on a book about the largest HIV/AIDS nonprofit in the world: AIDS Healthcare Foundation. It was co-founded by two best friends; it’s headquartered in Los Angeles; and, in 2014, it provided life-saving HIV drug treatment in thirty-six countries, including the United States. In the late 1980s, one of the best friends died from AIDS-related illnesses. The other, Michael Weinstein, has served as AHF’s president for decades.
To learn more about the organization, I was always flying somewhere and interviewing people, talking with more than two hundred people. By the end of 2014, I had traveled all over the world.
For one trip, I went around the globe in twenty-nine days, visiting Durban, South Africa; Lusaka, Zambia; Kampala and Masaka in Uganda; New Delhi, India; Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat in Cambodia; and Beijing, China. From Beijing, I flew back to L.A.
For another trip, I went to London, Amsterdam, and Geneva, then flew to Kyiv in Ukraine only months after the revolution. That was followed by visits to Tallinn and Narva in Estonia and St. Petersburg, Kazan, and Moscow in Russia.
For yet another trip, I went to Fort Lauderdale and Miami in Florida and then to Mexico City for a few days.
There was also a trip to New Orleans and Baton Rouge in Louisiana and then to Cleveland.
And there were trips to Nairobi, Kenya; Washington D.C.; Seattle; San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California; and Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio in Texas.
Before the book, I had been an investigative journalist in New York and Los Angeles, winning some awards along the way.
Among the stories I had covered, I wrote about the broken criminal justice system in the state of New York; the slashing of the budget for the Los Angeles Public Library system; education reform for grade school kids in Compton, California; environmental racism in a Los Angeles neighborhood called Wilmington; and political corruption of one kind or another in both New York and Los Angeles.
I already knew many things about power and the lack of power and wealth and the lack of wealth before I started the book about AHF.
Lately, I’ve been thinking it’s a good time to share the things I learned when I traveled all over the world. The major thing I learned is this: We are one.
It’s not a platitude. It’s not a cliché. It’s a truth. It’s one of the most important truths we can know. And it scares people in power.
We are one.
In early April of 2014, I started my trip around the globe. During the flight to South Africa, I read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Mandela had been a political prisoner for more than twenty-seven years. Then he was released from prison and was elected president of South Africa in 1994.
About fourteen hours into my flight, I read this:
“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”
I thought about that for the rest of the trip and for the rest of the year and I’m still thinking about it. It’s another important truth.
And what Mandela wrote went for a lot of things.
I am not free if I am scared of you. You are not free if you are scared of me.
I am not free if I seek revenge against you. You are not free if you seek revenge against me.
I am not free if I allow myself to be manipulated to hate you. You are not free if you allow yourself to be manipulated to hate me.
And so forth.
I don’t know about you, but I want to be free.
We are one.
I spent my first night in South Africa near the Indian Ocean in the coastal city of Durban, where I stayed at a bed and breakfast called the D’Urban Elephant. Too early the next morning, my driver showed up. His nickname was “Boy.” His given name was Alec Mdlalose.
Alec was not a boy, but a handsome Black South African in his thirties or forties. He wore gray dress pants, a button-down dress shirt underneath a v-neck sweater, and black leather shoes. He looked like a college professor, and he spoke softly and smiled easily and oozed class and dignity. Boy worked for AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
AHF was founded in 1987. It was a time when people living with HIV/AIDS were treated like lepers. Since L.A. politicians weren’t serving them, Michael Weinstein and his friends decided they would.
They banded together and owned their power and opened a hospice for terminally ill AIDS patients less than a block away from Dodger Stadium. People were given love and shelter and medical treatment before they eventually passed away. They died a dignified death because of Weinstein and his friends.
Then with the introduction of a new, life-saving drug, AHF switched things up. The organization focused on giving HIV treatment to anyone who needed it, especially the poor. Weinstein came up with this mission statement: “Cutting-edge medicine and advocacy, regardless of ability to pay.”
Over the decades, AHF has prevented millions of deaths and HIV infections all over the globe, including the United States. AHF is an example of America at its best: generous and caring, industrious and creative, brilliant and wise.
Now, in 2014, Boy drove me to the first clinic that AHF opened outside the United States. It was located in a township called Umlazi, around fourteen miles south of Durban. The name of the clinic is “Ithembalabantu.” In Zulu, that means “the people’s hope.”
Umlazi was beautiful, but it was also poor and underserved and people were still trying to recover from the decades-long damage caused by apartheid. In the 1960s, the white power structure had forced Black South Africans into Umlazi. It was similar to how the United States government pushed Native Americans into reservations.
In fact, it was the same old story. If you weren’t in the plans of the powerful, or if you were getting in the way of the plans of the powerful, you were forced out, abandoned, and forgotten. Other times you were just abandoned and forgotten.
The powerful, all over the world, are still doing it.
We are one.
At the Ithembalabantu Clinic, I talked with patients and nurses and doctors and activists. One nurse, Cynthia Luthuli, had worked at the clinic since it opened in 2002. She had seen too many people die horrible deaths from AIDS before AHF came to South Africa.
But when they started taking the new drug, she saw people grow healthy and become lively and go back to work. Cynthia said she saw miracles every day.
It was actually a miracle that AHF opened the clinic. At the beginning, the South African government didn’t want it. The politicians came up with their reasons, but AHF and South African AIDS activists wouldn’t back down.
When Weinstein visited South Africa at one point, he was told that if he didn’t cool it, the government would kick him out of the country. The activists were also taking heat. AHF and the activists still wouldn’t back down.
Then when AHF decided to open the clinic in Umlazi, so-called experts said it wouldn’t work. They said poor Africans wouldn’t stick to their drug regimens. AHF and the activists now had the South African government and the experts giving them the business.
Again they wouldn’t back down. Why? There was no other option. If they backed down, more people would die and more children would lose their parents and more people would be infected and die, too.
So similar to the friends that started up the hospice near Dodger Stadium, AHF and the South African activists banded together and opened the clinic in Umlazi and gave people life-saving medicine.
Then the miracles started happening — and the experts were proven wrong. More people lived and less people became infected and children were no longer orphaned.
It only happened because AHF and the activists carried out an elemental truth: we must help each other because we are one.
In Lusaka, Zambia, I was driven to an open market where AHF tested men and women and teenagers for HIV — heterosexual people were most likely to be infected in Zambia. Near the tent that the AHF testers had set up, people sold t-shirts and shoes, dresses and blankets, and soft drinks and trinkets. Near the merchants, little boys kicked around a soccer ball.
It reminded me of the flea market I went to with my friends when I was a kid in Solebury, Pennsylvania. People sold the same stuff: t-shirts and shoes, dresses and blankets, and soft drinks and trinkets.
And the people in Solebury were doing the same thing as the people in Zambia — they were both working hard to try to get ahead.
We are one.
Not far from the open market, there was a school with mission statement painted on one of its wall. It was the kind of mission that could have been used for schools in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York or London, Paris, and Madrid. The mural read:
We are one.
After my plane landed in Uganda, I was driven to a hotel in Kampala. Night was coming, and a constant rush of “boda bodas” zipped by us.
Boda bodas are motorcycle taxis operated by young people, all of whom are trying to do the same thing: earn a decent living to survive and thrive.
We are one.
In Kampala, I stayed at a Sheraton hotel, which sat on top of a hill and overlooked the city. Men with machine guns stood guard at the entrance because the people who ran the hotel were worried about terrorists. Uganda had a recent history of that kind of thing.
In the 1970s, President Idi Amin terrorized and killed hundreds of thousands of Ugandans so he could keep his power. After Amin fled the country, in 1979, powerful men continued to kill for their hold on power — and the Ugandan people continued to be terrorized.
But that didn’t happen only in Uganda. In countries all over the world, vicious leaders have done anything necessary to keep their power.
We are one.
Around eighty miles southwest of Kampala, AHF opened its second clinic outside the United States in a small city called Masaka. Unlike South Africa, Ugandan leaders welcomed AHF. One of the first doctors to work at the Masaka clinic was a woman called Penninah Iutung Amor. Everyone at AHF called her “Dr. Penny.”
Dr. Penny was an excellent doctor: smart and dedicated, compassionate and savvy. After a few years, Weinstein promoted her to Africa Bureau chief. By 2014, she was in charge of AHF’s operations in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Eswatini, and six other countries.
When I talked with Dr. Penny at her office in Kampala, she was not only fighting HIV/AIDS, but also monitoring a lethal Ebola outbreak in West Africa that would turn into a public health disaster a few months later.
Similar to the start of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the United States and other countries, politicians and bureaucracies were slow to react to Ebola, and many people died who didn’t need to die.
But Dr. Penny wasn’t going to allow the politicians and bureaucracies to get her down. She was an optimist or maybe an idealist or maybe both.
Dr. Penny’s eyes sparkled like an optimist and she spoke like an optimist and she worked hard to do good like an optimist.
In fact, she talked and acted just like the activists I had met when working on the stories about the broken criminal justice system in New York and education reform in Compton and environmental racism in L.A. They all believed that good-hearted people, if they banded together, could make things happen and improve lives and make the world better.
We are one.
In New Delhi, India, in front of my hotel, men with machine guns searched underneath my driver’s car. The owners of the hotel were also worried about terrorists.
But when I arrived at AHF’s clinic not far from the hotel, I noticed that two of the doctors had the same sparkle in their eyes as Dr. Penny. They were optimists or maybe idealists or maybe both, too.
We are one.
At one point during my visit to New Delhi, I was taken to a place called Raj Ghat. It was where a memorial had been built for Gandhi. Gandhi had been assassinated by a gunman in 1948, and the memorial marked the site where he had been cremated.
I had read a lot about Gandhi over the years and studied his way of life and tried to live the things he taught in my own imperfect way. Gandhi meant a lot to me. As we drove up to Raj Ghat, I was so excited I didn’t know what to do with myself.
But I kept it together and walked to the memorial and stood on line with dozens of other people. Many of us were from different parts of the world, but we all wanted to commune with the spirit of Gandhi.
We are one.
The memorial was a square platform made of black marble. On top of the platform, there were five circles of red, yellow, and orange flowers. Also on top of the platform, there was an eternal flame.
As I approached the memorial, I saw people bow their heads in front of it or take pictures in front of it or weep in front of it. When I stood in front of it, I suddenly got a lump in my throat and my eyes became misty. I was surprised that I reacted that way.
But when we walked back to the car, I got a handle on why I got emotional, and I had a hunch about why the other people got emotional.
I got emotional because I wanted a world with leaders like Gandhi in it, and we didn’t really have those leaders, which made me sad.
I also got emotional because Gandhi showed that we could have leaders like him in the world, and that gave me hope, which made me happy.
My hunch was that many of the other people at the memorial were thinking and feeling the same kinds of things that I was thinking and feeling. I especially thought many of the other people also wanted leaders like Gandhi.
We are one.
Only an hour after I arrived in Cambodia, I was taken to the office of Dr. Chhim Sarath in Phnom Penh — many young people, again, were zipping around on motorbikes.
The same way that Idi Amin terrorized the people of Uganda, the Khmer Rouge, in the 1970s, terrorized the people of Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge killed as many as three million people to keep its power.
Dr. Sarath was the Asia Bureau chief for AHF. He was also one of the Cambodians who had been terrorized in the 1970s. His aunts had been killed by the Khmer Rouge, and, as a child, he was forced to work in a forest far away from his family. He didn’t have shoes, and he didn’t have a blanket to keep him warm at night.
But Dr. Sarath didn’t let the Khmer Rouge get him down. He worked in the forest and the Khmer Rouge eventually fell out of power and he then studied hard to become a doctor. By 2005, Dr. Sarath was working for AHF, and he created the Cambodia program out of nothing.
Just like Cynthia Luthuli in South Africa and Dr. Penny in Uganda and the AHF team in India, Dr. Sarath joined AHF to save lives. And even when the politicians tried to divide them or even when the politicians tried to terrorize them or even when the politicians tried to abandon them, the people at AHF still made things happen and improved lives and made the world better.
We are one.
After I spent a couple of days in Beijing, China, it occurred to me that many of the people I had interviewed during my trip were telling me the same thing: we must help each other because we are one.
I heard it, one way or another, in South Africa and Zambia and Uganda and India and Cambodia and now in China.
It also occurred to me that the politicians didn’t like the idea that we are one. The politicians, in fact, wanted to stop us from being one.
So they used morals to divide us. They used fear to divide us. And they used our so-called differences to divide us. It was the old divide-and-conquer technique.
Because the “we are one” thing made the politicians scared and anxious and, in many cases, vicious. They feared they would lose their power.
And for a while, the politicians got away with dividing us. And we allowed them to get away with it.
But the day before I flew back to L.A., an interesting thing happened.
I was taken on a trip to Badaling, the most visited section of the Great Wall of China. It was magnificent and impressive and beautiful. So I held up my phone to take pictures. That was when the interesting thing happened.
Nearly every time that I held up my phone, a young man or a young woman or a group of young men and women instantly broke into a pose. I didn’t ask them to pose. They just did it.
I was surprised, but then I realized I shouldn’t be. It was something that people all over the world do whenever a phone is pointed at them: they stop everything and break into a pose.
It seemed like a silly thing, but it gave me hope, which made me happy. Because now I was sure. And trips to Amsterdam and Dallas and Nairobi and New Orleans and St. Petersburg and everywhere else only confirmed it: We are one, we are one, we are one.
Read “This Is America: Part One” — the companion piece to “We Are One: Part Two.”
