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Princess Kasune Zulu's testimony of hope and life almost always begins with death. AIDS killed her parents and two of her siblings. And more recently, it has infected her and her husband.

What's more tragic is that her experience is not that unusual from that of countless other African families who can now expect an encounter with AIDS the same way many American families anticipate a visit from the flu bug. Every day 6,500 Africans die of AIDS, and another 9,500 are infected, including 1,400 infants.

The thing that sets Princess Zulu's situation apart is that she's willing to talk about her HIV status. Since 1997, when she first tested positive, she has been on a mission to help HIV/AIDS sufferers in her native country of Zambia and throughout Africa escape the fear and stigma that accompany the disease and invariably perpetuate its further spread.

"For me to live is the grace of God," she says proudly. "I shall not die but live and proclaim the grace of God." And for Zulu, part of proclaiming that grace is to tell others about her status, educate them on preventing the disease, and to inform those who are already afflicted that regardless of their condition, they can find abundant life in Jesus Christ. "The Bible has much to say on awareness, prevention, and care for the ill, as well as hope for the dying," she adds.

	In Africa, many people with AIDS die before they are dead because of poverty. —Princess Zulu

Ken Casey, who is World Vision International's Special Assistant to the President on AIDS, was in Zulu's village when he first heard her testimony. "I was so impressed by her story and her ability to tell it," he says. "When she tells her story, the pandemic becomes real."

As a result, Princess Zulu, who is 27, became an international spokesperson and AIDS educator for World Vision's Hope Initiative, a nationwide campaign to mobilize Christians and the general public to take action against the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

"World Vision and the Hope Initiative shows that there is hope—even in the midst of HIV and AIDS," Zulu says. "I am living proof."

Through her own grassroots HIV/AIDS ministry in Zambia and her weekly national radio program called Positive Living, Princess Zulu is educating and encouraging the people of Africa. And now through World Vision, her story is challenging American congregations to support HIV/AIDS programs in developing countries and to pray for the tens of millions people affected by AIDS around the world.

A heritage of pain
Zulu carries herself with an air of grace and regality that befits her name. "Princess," it turns out, is her given name, not her title (though there is some royal blood in her distant lineage). When she enters the room, adorned in her colorful African attire, you can't help feeling that you're in the presence of someone who is full of purpose and life.

Her mission to combat AIDS wasn't always as clear-cut. Before becoming a committed Christian at 19, she led a sometimes-reckless lifestyle, giving in to the peer pressure to have premarital sex. "The death of my mum and dad contributed to even greater pressure," she has said. Seeking intimacy through sex became a way to cope with her despair.

"The first person in my family to die of AIDS was my baby sister at age 7," Zulu recalls. "She probably died from mother-to-child [HIV] transmission."

When AIDS struck that first time, in the mid-1980s, Zulu was a little girl herself. Back then the epidemic was an emerging menace spiraling through Zambia and across southern Africa. Zulu didn't understand the ways of the mysterious virus that dwelled in her parents' bodies and stole her sister.

"I think that my mother knew that she was dying too," Zulu says in her small but steady voice that increases in pitch as she peels back the scars of her past. "I remember that my mother called me over to her one night and told me, 'Princess, you've got to be strong.' I didn't really understand then why she was saying that. But I think that she knew the end was coming."

Her father was a tall, medium-built man before AIDS ravaged his body. In sickness "he was lighter, but he was still tall and his legs dragged on the ground," remembers Zulu who, on more than one occasion, set out from her village with her dying father slung across her small back in search of a doctor.

By the time she was 14, Zulu's parents were dead. The third of five children, she was left destitute and in charge of two brothers and a sister. (One of those brothers died of AIDS last year.)

"I could only support [my family] by marrying an older man," she says matter-of-factly of her decision to marry Moffat Zulu, a man 25 years her senior, when she was only 17. A widower, Moffat had already lost two wives to AIDS.

What is perhaps the saddest and darkest twist to Princess Zulu's story is that she and her husband are today HIV-positive. Though she does not know whether she contracted the virus from her husband or from previous relationships, Zulu refuses to blame others.

Going public
Death and disease teach powerful lessons, even when you don't know what's doing the killing. "I only realized that my parents died of AIDS much later on in my life when I started reading books and magazines and watching shows on TV about AIDS," says Zulu. By then, it was too late to help save her family or even herself.

But that knowledge and the memories of her family's deaths led her to suspect that she too was infected. She describes it as "an inner voice that led me to be tested. When I did my HIV test, I had no symptoms."

Her friends thought she was crazy for even thinking about getting tested. She looked good and felt good, and they knew the abuse that many women with HIV/AIDS faced in Zambia. Many in the country avoid being tested, afraid to name the illness that is slowly killing them. Others keep their results secret for fear of the rejection and shame.

"I was determined [to be tested]," Zulu says defiantly. "You have to understand the situation in my country. Some men blame women for bringing the disease into the home or force them to leave the home and everything behind."

It took weeks of lecturing, praying, and pleading before she got her husband's permission to be tested—and his agreement to get tested too.

"You look healthy. You're better off not knowing," one doctor told Zulu. Another asked, "Why do you want to be tested if there is no cure and no medicine for you?"

For Zulu, it was a matter of faith. "If there is no hope from the medical perspective," she told her doctor, "then at least I can take it to God in prayer and he'll know what to do with it."

She remembers the day she got her results. "I heard a voice in my head telling me to praise God."

She was HIV-positive. "I don't remember crying. I started asking the doctor what's next. Then I went home and told my friend. Because I looked healthy, people thought that I was joking when I told them that I had HIV. What happened that day has become part of my message when I speak to people. I let them know that people can look healthy and still have AIDS," she says.

Messages of healing seemed to leap from the Bible that she picked up that day when she got home, Zulu remembers. "My friend thought that I was hysterical when I picked up my Bible and started reading and reciting every scripture on healing." Before she could finish one verse, another tumbled prophetically from her mouth.

Immediately, Zulu decided to go public with her diagnosis and her hope in Christ in a country where secrecy on the AIDS issue prevails, and where many African clergy have been slow to respond.

Zulu began speaking to hospital patients and friends about HIV/AIDS and the need for compassion. She also shared her testimony and AIDS education with workers at several large banks and businesses in the country.

But one of the hardest talks she had to give was to her two daughters, Joy and Faith, when they were just 1 and 3 years old. "I went into the bathroom and started to cry," she recalls. "It was so hard. I called them in and told them that there is a disease that has come called HIV and that God is a healer, but sometimes God lets people die." More tough lessons for her daughters, now 7 and 9, came two years later. "I taught them not to have bad manners around boys," says Zulu. Thinking back, she says, "If my mother only knew then what she was dying from, maybe she could have taught my siblings and me how to keep from getting it [HIV]."

She has taught her daughters well. Joy and Faith are probably the most knowledgeable children in Zambia when it comes to AIDS, their teachers tell Zulu. They also know that someday AIDS will claim their parents. "They pray a lot for us and the orphans and for a cure," says their proud mother.

She adds that both Joy and Faith—and her five stepchildren—are currently free of the disease. "We have tested our children for HIV three times, and they are negative." One doctor has called it "a miracle from God." And Princess agrees.

Giving their all
In Zambia alone, HIV/AIDS is projected to wipe out half of the country's 10 million people if it's not arrested. Most people in Zambia—90 percent—as in most other African nations, contract the deadly disease through heterosexual sex, says Princess Zulu. Still others receive contaminated blood or infected mothers transmit the virus to their newborns.

AIDS has already claimed a million plus people in Zambia and made orphans of nearly 600,000 boys and girls. An estimated 30,000 children a year are born with the disease, and more than half won't live long enough to see their fifth birthday.

"In Africa, many people [with HIV/AIDS] die before they are dead, not necessarily from infections associated with HIV, but because of poverty and lack." explains Zulu. "Those who are sick and have HIV need good food, medicine, and healthcare to stay strong. But in this country, so many go without."

In 1997, Princess and her husband Moffat gave up their large Luanshya house to establish a community school called the Fountain of Life. The Christian school, which is run by a local pastor and his wife, serves some 200 AIDS orphans and other children.

Recently, Moffat has lost at least two jobs due to what Princess believes is HIV/AIDS discrimination. But the Zulus continue to serve, giving all they have to assist others.

Where's the church?
To date, Princess Zulu counts her April 29 White House meeting with President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell as one of her greatest opportunities to speak globally on behalf of millions of women, orphans and vulnerable children whose lives have been derailed by the pandemic.

Zulu implored President Bush and sent a message to Congress urging the swift passage of the President's $15 billion AIDS plan. She told Bush that the "crisis in Africa requires immediate attention."

A month later, Bush signed the five-year global AIDS Bill. But U.S. money alone will not solve the problem. Zulu hopes to see American Christians respond with more prayer and compassion.

She has called the church in the U.S. and globally "a sleeping giant that needs to arise" when it comes to confronting the AIDS issue. The work of the church has been "left up to the Bill Gates Foundation and to other secular organizations," she says. "Where is the church at a time such as this?"

Though she brims with hope, Zulu holds no allusions about her likely fate. She speaks about her death with the same thoughtfulness and zeal that she does about the full life she is living. "I'm writing a will and saving all that I can for my daughters. I am not afraid. I know that God will take care of my children when I'm gone."

But she also knows that the here and now commands her attention, and until her time comes, she'll continue to serve with passion. "Life isn't how many years you live," she says, "but what you do with the life you are given."

For more information about Princess Zulu's ministry, visit hopeinitiative.org, or call 1-888-303-2003.

A Christian Reader original article. B. Denise Hawkins is a writer in the Washington, D.C. area.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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