Rollingwood man fights African HIV/AIDS

AUSTIN (KXAN) - It started with an interview. David Barstow was sitting in an audience at Westlake Hills Presybterian Church in August of 2006. He was watching a video transmission in which Bono, the musician/singer/humanitarian, talk about HIV/AIDS in Africa.

"I like to say that Bono wrecked my life," Barstow said. "And, of course, 'wrecked' is a positive term in this way. One of the things that Bono said was that he couldn't understand why Christians had taken so long to respond to the AIDS crisis in Africa. And so I'm sitting in the audience and I'm thinking, 'Well, I'm a Christian,' and I've been to Africa many times on business---I had some consulting business there---and tourism---I love the place---and I hadn't done anything. So I felt like, you know, he was pointing the finger at me and saying, 'Why haven't you done something?'"

So Barstow decided he would do something. Working with his church, Barstow created EMPACT Africa ---that's EMPACT with an "E," and it stands for Empowering Pastors to Act. EMPACT Africa funds workshops for pastors and church leaders to help them guide their congregations into more supportive and compassionate treatment of HIV/AIDS victims.

"The trouble with HIV and AIDS is that the mode of transmission is primarily sexual contact," said Barstow. "So that means there's automatically some kind of attitude, judgmental attitude often, about people who have HIV or AIDS. It's not like malaria. With malaria, you get stung by a mosquito and everybody can kind of understand that. But, 'Oh, you had sex with somebody and that's how you got it. Well, that's something you shouldn't do.' And it's that judgmental attitude that is really quite strong and unfortunately, it's often strongest in churches. So of the places that people should be able to go to seek help, often churches are the ones where they don't feel like they can go, because of their fear of the judgmental attitude.

"The attitude is reflected in people being shunned; they're kicked out of their families; they lose their jobs. So there are a lot of, sort of, day-to-day living things that get affected by this."

Perhaps the most heartbreaking example of that comes with the transmission of the disease from a mother to her unborn child.

"That's essentially medically preventable from a medical point of view," said Barstow. "If you can get the people to the clinics and they can get the right medications and take them with the right nutrition and so on, that transmission is preventable. But if pregnant women are afraid to seek help because of the stigma, then they won't seek help and their kids are born with HIV. So that's a place where the stigma has a direct, observable effect on the transmission of the disease."

To fight back, EMPACT Africa uses its workshops to develop action plans and then sends pastors and other church leaders back into their congregations to carry them out. Along the way, something unexpected happened. As people grew more comfortable with the idea of talking about their HIV/AIDS status, support groups emerged almost spontaneously.

"Maybe we should have expected it but we didn't," Barstow said. "But suddenly these support groups just kind of popped up, and what that meant was the people who previously had been afraid to seek help in church now recognized that their church was place they could go for help. They would have to be open about their concerns and their status, but they would get help. People came out of the woodwork."

Meanwhile, the scope of the problem becomes clearer and clearer. In the East African nation of Zambia alone, the average life expectancy has dropped to under 40 years of age and an estimated 120,000 children are living with the disease. More than 300,000 other kids have been orphaned by it.

The people who are most affected by HIV and AIDS are people from the ages of 15 to 40, where sexual activity is the greatest," Barstow said. "Those are the people that are infected and die off if they can't the medications. So we really are losing a chunk of people, the productive people. These are the people that you want to bring your country out of poverty to join the rest of the world economy. These are the people that you want to be productive. If they're sick; if they have to worry about just talking about their illness, then how can they be productive?"

Barstow said the organization needs local churches to partner with African churches to keep the workshops growing. Money, of course, is also welcome and to that end, a benefit concert is planned for Wednesday night, March 23, at the Nutty Brown Amphitheater at 12225 U.S. Highway 290 West. It will feature several Austin musicians and singer-songwriters, along with three actors from NBC's " Friday Night Lights" television show.

The stars of the event, however, are likely to be a dozen or so members of the African Children's Choir . Many of the choir members are AIDS orphans themselves. They travel the world entertaining audiences and melting hearts.

"Part