Award-winning author and journalist Melissa Fay Greene delivered the annual Johnston Lecture, titled “A Writer Bearing Witness: AIDS Orphans in Africa,” to students and community members in the Knight Library Browsing Room Thursday.
The Johnston Lecture is part of the Richard W. Johnston Memorial Project to memorialize the 1936 School of Journalism and Communication graduate and co-founder of Sports Illustrated.
Professor Lauren Kessler, who heads the Literary Nonfiction program at the University, introduced Greene, saying, “She cares, and through prodigious work and artful narrative, we care.”
Greene’s work has brought her from a mining disaster two-and-a-half miles underground in Springhill, Nova Scotia, Canada, for her book “Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster,” to an Ethiopian orphanage for a landmark New York Times article about children orphaned by AIDS. Her first book, “Praying for Sheetrock,” which documents the triumph of a black community in rural Georgia over racism, was named one of the top 100 works of American journalism in the 20th century by the New York University School of Journalism.
Greene’s speech focused around her work in Ethiopia. She began by saying there are 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa and posed the question: “Who’s going to sign 11 million permission slips…our readers, the public, don’t care about millions. They can’t count that high.”
Greene spoke about two orphanages in the Ethiopian capital: the Layla House, a house for healthy orphans, and Enat (an Amharic word for mother), an orphanage for HIV-positive children. She also shared a number of anecdotes, collected through interviews with actual orphans. Some moved the audience to laughter on several occasions, including when she perplexed the Ethiopian orphans with whoopee cushions; others brought a solemn silence across the room.
“There is a terrible sameness to the stories. They all head down the same path: the mother’s death, then the father’s…alone, bringing out the words of the family’s end, a child’s eyes fill with tears,” she wrote in the New York Times article.
Greene’s visit to Ethiopia wasn’t strictly business, however. The author was in the process of adopting an Ethiopian orphan, Helen. Helen arrived in the United States in February 2002, and Greene, like any other proud parent, couldn’t resist sharing stories about her six-year-old adopted child.
Greene made a parallel between her adoption of Helen and her work as a journalist.
“Adoption says that the face of this one smiling, curly-haired little boy stands for the face of Africa’s AIDS orphans…Journalism has to play a similar role,” she said. “Narrative nonfiction stories ask the world to remember that these children are not just digits and numbers…but they recall that each sick and famine-stricken parent and each stranded child is a person worthy of our time and respect.”