MISSION: Fight AIDS “segregation”
MOMENT OF TRUTH: As director of an AIDS advocacy ministry in Wheaton, Ogilvie handles a lot of requests–for information, for care, for money. But a recent request, from a Kenyan pastor visiting the Chicago area, was different. Jackson Wanalo and his wife had lost three of their adult children in four years to AIDS, and were raising 17 orphaned grandchildren in a village devastated by the disease. One day, Wanalo said to Ogilvie, “So, my brother, when are you going to come to visit us?”
“That was it,” Ogilvie says. “I decided to go.” He also decided to bring people not doing AIDS work “but who probably should be– people with AIDS.”
BACKSTORY: Ogilvie, 42, tested HIV positive in 1993. He does not believe that a terminal illness entitles people to retreat from their lives. At Canticle Ministries, he gets the community at large “to stop segregating people with AIDS. Similarly, I turn around [to people with AIDS] and say, ‘You cannot sit around and be segregated. You need to be part of the solution.’ “
OUTCOME: Next month, Ogilvie will take a dozen people, most of whom are HIV positive, to Wanalo’s remote village to plant crops and construct buildings. The two-week trip also is intended to instill a sense of accomplishment and hope in those making the journey.
“Instead of people thinking that [we] are people [they] need to take care of, we’re saying no, we’re going to go and take care of others.”
PAYOFF: “Everybody who is going will come back seeing themselves and the world in a completely different way. It is also going to change how people who don’t have AIDS view those of us who do.”
