If I asked you to choose 10 people right now who you could not imagine living without, who would you pick? Your kids? Your friends that you have become so close to over the years that you swear they are family? Your parents? Your significant other?

Before I left for Africa, I celebrated my birthday with a group of my closest girlfriends. We laughed and talked over decadent cheesecake and glasses of smooth red wine. As I looked around the table, I thought about how lucky I was to call these smart, beautiful, and generous women my friends.

If I grew up here in South Africa and sat around a table with this same group of women, the odds are that out of 15 of us, 5 of us would have HIV. This statistic is one of the many that continues to shock me. Imagine if one out of every three women that you knew between the ages of 27-32 was living with HIV?

Before I came to Africa, the only time I gave AIDS the slightest thought was when, like a good, coffee loving Vancouverite, I used my (RED) Starbucks card. The disease certainly hadn’t affected my friends or I in any significant way. It was easy for me to think of HIV and AIDS as something that happens to OTHER people. Here, I can’t escape the numbers. In South Africa, 1000 new HIV infections happen EVERY DAY and 1000 people die EVERY DAY of AIDS related illnesses.

Here HIV/AIDS affects the people that you love. Of the ten people that you can’t imagine living without, you would have probably already buried at least one. You would have gone to the hospital on multiple occasions to visit another two or three as they recovered from an AIDS related infection like TB or PCP Pneumonia. You might even be raising the child of one of most important people in your life because that child is one of the 1.5M+ children orphaned by AIDS in South Africa.

It is one thing to read statistics on the Internet. It is far different to meet a man who lives with the disease and the gruelling side effects of antiretroviral treatments on a daily basis. To talk to a woman who reminds you of your friends back home and hear how her sister-in-law died because she couldn’t get access to treatment. To see the sores on the faces of children born into a lifetime of fighting a disease that they never asked for.

Sometimes the weight of all of it presses up hard against my chest.

Then, I am reminded of the strength of the people that I continue to meet. Their ability to persevere through hardship after hardship humbles me and I am once again inspired to stay grateful for the many blessings in my life….