Imagine that you have worked long hours for months of each year in order to make their lives more bearable.

Now imagine that you see a new danger threatening to overwhelm both them and their communities.

That is what Samaritan's Purse is currently seeing as it considers the communities in which it works in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union .

While the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa makes world headlines, the threat is just as real - and growing fast - in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union .

In recent years, HIV/AIDS has spread remorselessly through these countries. Now it has got a deadly grip. The number of people affected varies from country to country but, as official statistics do not always keep up with the actual spread of the disease, it is difficult to be specific.

In Russia alone the likely figure is 1.5 million people who are HIV positive – an estimated 70% through unclean needles used in the country's widespread drug addiction problem.

In the Ukraine some unofficial estimates put the number of HIV/AIDS affected people at 700,000. .

Overall, HIV/AIDS has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union . Several million more people in that vast region are thought to be HIV positive. Certainly over the next ten years many will die.

HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is a threat which requires an urgent and co-ordinated response. It is a threat which Samaritan's Purse has been getting ready to help fight with all the resources that it can raise.

It's easy to understand SP's deep concern. After 15 years of delivering Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes and other forms of relief throughout the area, it has a heart committed to helping the needy people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union .

Jonathan Hett, SP's Head of Programmes & Projects in the UK says: “Too many Christians tend to see HIV/AIDS as almost a judgment of God upon sinful people. But this is a distorted perception of sexual sin. The Bible teaches us that everything that falls short of the glory of God is sin, whether it is pride, greed, selfish ambition or lust. “So really, the problem of HIV/AIDS is no different from any other disease that kills people. Like many diseases, HIV/AIDS is helped by the widespread poverty of the region. There is an urgent need to warn people how to avoid contracting it.

So what strategy will Samaritan's Purse use in fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republic

It is two-fold: based on a new approach to SP's work, and by adding a new structure to our existing partnerships.

New approach

Fighting a pandemic calls for a strategy that is based on reaching the greatest number of people possible BEFORE they contract the disease. It makes little sense to simply wait and concentrate on the intensive nursing of incurably ill people once they have the disease.

For this reason, Samaritan's Purse is changing its approach. Where once it was ‘institution focused', caring for a small number of children in an orphanage, for example, it is now moving towards being more ‘community focused' – offering training and resources to the larger community – in order to warn them before it is too late.

This approach makes excellent use of limited finances. For the same cost of maintaining a small hospital or orphanage for a few dozen people, literally tens of thousands of people can be effectively taught and supported to not get the disease in the first place.

New partnership

In June of this year, Samaritan's Purse established a partnership with an organisation called Geneva Global. Together SP and Geneva Global will be funding major projects on HIV/AIDS prevention work in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union .

With the setting up of the SP/Geneva Global HIV/AIDS fund for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union a new “threefold partnership” has been established. Very briefly, it works like this: Geneva Global and SP will work to find donors worldwide. Some of these will be corporate donors as well as concerned individuals who wish to “invest” in the fund.

The donors will then commit themselves to financing any one of a number of projects which have been carefully researched before being adopted as officially sanctioned Samaritan's Purse projects.

Once the finance and the overall aim of the project is set in place, the actual work is carried out on the ground through our long-standing excellent and sometimes new partnerships with small indigenous NGOs in each country, who can work most effectively there.

So – does the partnership with Geneva Global make the role of Samaritan's Purse's existing individual donors less important?

Not at all! All it does is to widen our potential constituency, and give us additional means of raising money.

While Geneva Global puts in some funds, and does research on possible projects, SP still relies heavily on our own donors to “invest” in the HIV/AIDS fund, thereby freeing up other money that is used to “underwrite” it.

What are we hoping to achieve in such a vast ocean of need?

The next three years seems clear enough: Samaritan's Purse hopes to establish a much broader portfolio of programmes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union that will aim to reach the highest number of vulnerable people possible – whether through drug rehabilitation projects, educational/prevention programmes or advocacy interventions.

Simon Barrington, Executive Director of SP says: Because of the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, everything we do in SP has to now consider the impact of the disease on the communities and projects with whom we are working. This is particularly true in Africa, but will increasingly become the case in Europe as well as we move through the next decade.

<Back