Canadian writer and activist Deborah Ellis talks about the AIDS epidemic

In your latest book, Our Stories, Our Songs: African Children Talk about AIDS, you write that 11.5 million children in sub-Saharan Africa have lost their parents to AIDS. Is there any hope?

I certainly find hope in the people who are there. We don't get a good sense of people in African countries from our news stories or charity commercials. We just get a sense of people being fairly helpless or hacking each other to death. We don't get a sense of them as being people with incredible skills and competencies. There's so many really good people on the ground there, doing the very best that they can with this horrible situation. So the hope that I feel is in them. The despair I feel is pretty much in the rest of the world. We have the opportunity to share our resources to make their job a lot easier and, by and large, that's not happening.

What's the worst part of being an AIDS orphan?

When I was doing the Israel-Palestine book, Three Wishes, I asked each kid if they could tell me what their three wishes were. I asked the same question of the children I met in south Africa and most of them weren't able to come up with enough sense of the future that they could even have those wishes. That was the most horrifying thing for me.

After a friend finished reading your book, she said she felt like writing checks to all of the AIDS organizations listed in it.

That's a wonderful reaction. Kids don't have the economic power to do that, although a lot of them have taken up fund-raising in their classroom, which is great. But it's not just that I want kids raising money. I also want them to understand that the world is created out of choices that we make. They have the absolute power to make choices that are going to affect and shape the world.

When you spoke to children at the headquarters of the National Association of People with AIDS in Malawi, they seemed more hopeful and less terrified than other kids.

It was a remarkable organization. This is a country where there has been huge silence about AIDS, and denial and shame about it. It's much like what happened here, when people started to stand up and say, “I have AIDS. I'm a human being. I deserve the same respect as every other human being.” When people start to stand up and say, “My son has AIDS, I love him. My brother has AIDS, I love him,” it creates a community where that shame is taken away. When you take away shame and you take away fear, people are able to start to be themselves and to reach out to other people, and it's incredible what happens. It seems like a very simple thing, but it's like opening a room and letting in some fresh air and chasing out all the fear and the degradation and allowing good things to happen.

As a writer traveling alone in Africa, did you ever fear for your own safety?

I got robbed by men pretending to be police officers in Kenya and chased by a guy with a machete in Malawi. I hesitate to mention those experiences, because, by and large, people were very gracious and kind.

Do you ever get discouraged when you're in the field, working on a book?

Of course I get down, and I get lonely, and I find it difficult. What keeps me going is the people that I meet. It really doesn't matter if I'm uncomfortable or lonely or unhappy or whatever the situation is that you're afraid of. That's really very irrelevant. It all comes down to collecting the stories and showing other people that these lives have meaning. That's all that really matters.