A Seleda.Com Editorial

The stories, poems, anecdotes and articles in this month’s issue will stupefy your mind, break your heart and sear your soul. The statistics, shocking as they are, cannot match the eloquent force of the description of an HIV positive orphaned child’s hunger for the embrace of another human being.

If you are reading this on-line, then you are most probably among the most fortunate of Ethiopians, privileged to live and prosper in the rich west. You are of the generation that has had its harrowing experiences, and yet you have triumphed, personally and communally, to sow deep roots in a new land.

Dr. Berhanu Nega, in a piece entitled "Economic Holocaust", writes, "The disease has killed many times more compatriots than all the wars this country has fought against foreign aggression […] combined." Behind these numbers lies the story of the decimation of a generation of the educated, those on whose skills tomorrow was supposed to be built. All this with a disease that only became known in the early 1980s, a mere generation ago.

Yes indeed, we are of the generation that has been tested, and yet, we are being asked, once again as never before, to face a calamity of Biblical proportion. Where we cannot offer a cure, what is our response going to be?

Our response to the AIDS meqseft, as horrible and as vast as it is, in the end boils down to a choice. Between love and death.

We ask that you choose love.

We humbly ask that first of all you love life. Love life enough to make the right decision for yourselves and those around you. Love your friends and intimate ones enough to respect their well-being. But most of all, love yourself enough to believe in a tomorrow worth protecting yourself for.

And while you are loving yourself, please feel free to visit our Do The Right Thing page, and extend your love to an orphan who has permanently lost the right to being unconditionally loved in a way only a mother and father can. It is a mere $20 a month. If you are among the first ten to send us a copy of your e-mail committing to adopting a child, we shall grace you with a one of a kind free Seleda T-Shirt.