Great News

President Obama announced today that the travel ban on HIV+ immigrants coming to the US has been lifted. You can read the news article here. This is wonderful news for our family for many reasons. We will not have to wait for our waiver to be returned after our embassy appointment when we travel to Ethiopia to pick up Jubilee (finally came up with a blog name for her). This will make our travel arrangements easier, since we will have a definite return date. It will save us $545, which was what the visa waiver cost. And it means there is one less pile of paperwork that I need to track down.

My joy at this news was severely diminished when I read the comments after the article. There is so much misinformation surrounding HIV. Yes, there are medical costs associated with caring for HIV, but they are not exorbitant. Medical costs are so hard to compare, because there is such a disconnect between the patient and the final bill. I can say that so far we have spent a whole lot more money on teeth than we have on HIV. It breaks my heart that these people are still seen as a contagion, and not as a person. The other very disturbing attitude is that these people somehow deserve this illness, and we healthy Americans don't. That attitude really gets me worked up, but I will not rant about it. Let's just say that illness seems to strike many of us and I don't think anyone ever earned it. Yes, I do realize that certain behaviours lead to certain illnesses, but they don't every time, it is still very inconsistent.

I'm going to let love cover this one, and just admit that there was a day when I too was very ignorant about HIV. It didn't take a college degree to figure out that it is a manageable disease that affects a very large and diverse population. By taking a little bit of time to look at the world from someone else's perspective, and realizing that but for the grace of God it could have been me, I realized that people infected with HIV are no different than I am. They need someone to love them and some of them need parents to take care of them. Today I am rejoicing that one obstacle to getting our daughter home has been removed.