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    There Is No Me Without You
    There Is No Me Without You
    There Is No Me Without You
    Audiobook14 hours

    There Is No Me Without You

    Written by Melissa Fay Greene

    Narrated by Julie Fain Lawrence

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    About this audiobook

    The National Book Award finalist puts a human face on the AIDS crisis in Africa with this account of an Ethiopian widow who welcomed over sixty AIDS orphaned children into her home, caring for them and helping to place them with new families.

    A powerful and ongoing story of hope in the face of despair, it is at its heart simply about children and parents, wherever they may be and however they may find each other.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 11, 2006
    ISBN9781598873566
    Author

    Melissa Fay Greene

    Melissa Fay Greene is the author of Praying for Sheetrock; The Temple Bombing; Last Man Out; There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue her Country’s Children; and No Biking in the House Without A Helmet. Her honors include two National Book Award nominations, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the ACLU National Civil Liberties Award, the Hadassah Myrtle Wreath Award, the Salon Book Award, Elle Magazine’s Readers’ Prize, the Georgia Author Award, and a Dog Writers of America Award. She is a current Guggenheim Fellow.

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    Reviews for There Is No Me Without You

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      An excellent book to read to learn about the AIDS epidemic in Africa ( this book's focus is Ethiopia).It mainly is one woman's story Haregewoin Teferra, a woman who does not plan to but winds up creating an orphanage as so many children lose both their parents to AIDS.
    • 3/5
      Like some other readers, I was a little disappointed by some of Greene's more obvious emotional manipulations. Also, I was little annoyed that she didn't really reveal her own involvement in the story, beyond just that of a journalist, until at least halfway through the book. She spends more time than really makes sense defending herself against the claim of having failed to meet Haregewoin at the airport, which makes me wonder what else about their relationship she hasn't revealed. Overall,the is a heartwringer, pay-attention-to-this issue kind of book rather than a real study of the issue. Most of the history of Ethiopia and AIDS is fairly basic background, appropriate for the book's intended audience.
    • 4/5
      Audio book narrated by Julie Fain Lawrence

      Consumed by grief at the loss of her husband and oldest daughter, Haregewoin Teferra, a middle-class Ethiopian woman, finds solace in attending daily church services – regardless of denomination – and becomes known to other regular church-goers as a very devout woman. True relief eludes her, however, and she decides to ask the local Orthodox priest to be taken into seclusion, so she can spend her days living in a simple hut near the graves of those she loved. But before taking that final step Haregewoin makes the rounds of the churches where she had been welcomed. At the Catholic Church the director of their charity surprises her when he says that he and the priest has just been talking about Haregewoin that morning; the priest thought she might do a favor for him. Curious, she asks what she could possibly do for the priest. Well, there is a 15-year-old orphan, living on the streets; perhaps Haregewoin might be willing to take the girl into her home? A few weeks later they ask her to take in another teen; and then a pair of six-year-old girls. And in this way Haregewoin, without even knowing that she is at the center of a global health disaster and with no training or funding, begins to foster the AIDS orphans of Ethiopia.

      Greene is a journalist and has clearly done extensive research. She writes Haregewoin’s story in a compassionate and balanced way, backed up with considerable information on the history of Ethiopia, its culture and religions, as well as the history of HIV/AIDS and the conflict between big pharmaceutical firms intent on profit and protecting their patents, vs. the poor of Africa and other Third World countries who are dying from the pandemic due to lack of medical care. For my own tastes, I wish she had concentrated on Haregewoin’s story, which I found compelling, sometimes frustrating, and mostly heart-warming. I was far less interested in a research piece on epidemiology. I believe Greene might have found a way to include some of this information without disrupting the personal story arc; for example, she could have opened each chapter with factoid bullet points, and put the detailed exposition in an appendix.

      Still, the book is well-written and held my interest. Julie Fain Lawrence does a very good job narrating the audio version. I’m glad I had a text version as well, however, or I would have missed all the photographs.
    • 4/5
      Having read Melissa Fay Greene book "No Biking in the House Without a Helmet" I was quite interested in finding out about the way she actually found the foster mother in Ethopia, who saved all these children.It was a very good book, but some of the scientific, economic and political explanations went a bit over my head. My husband thoroughly enjoyed it and said he would give it at least 4.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      Set in Ethiopa over the past 15 years with a cast of AIDS orphans and a private individual attempting to help them, this book reveals the challenges AIDS presents in the third world. Though she sometimes stumbles in her narrative and transitions, Greene does an admirable job of conveying the needs of the AIDS orphans she depicts. She is clearly very invested in the issue, having adopted one herself! I was particularly intrigued by the section on the possible role of African injection hygiene on the development and spread of AIDS. I guess i haven't been following the news, because I had never heard of this, but it is an intriguing theory. The development of her main character Haregewoin (from bereaved mother to adoptive mother to adoption advocate to activist) is interesting, though sometimes a bit two dimensional. I sort of wished that Haregewoin could keep to her early role and only try to help as many children as she could love.
    • 4/5
      Melissa Fay Greene tells the story of Haregewoin Tererra, a woman of modest means,who opens her house and home to AIDS orphans. Nothing is ever simple in Ethiopia, andthis story is not either. To Green's credit, she tell's the story as truthfully as shecan. On my flight to Ethiopia, the plane is full of young families (almost always white,it seems to me) heading to Addis to adopt orphaned children. And on the plane home, youcan see without a doubt that these children are going to be smothered in love and affection,pampered in ways that will be the polar opposite of their life in Addis. But, still, thereis something in me that keeps me from getting my head totally around the adoption process.These children are ripped from their entire culture and placed in another. I'm not surethat is always the best idea. This book wrestles with these problems and issues. I foundit immensely though provoking.
    • 5/5
      This was an amazing book about an Ethiopian woman who is grieving the deaths of her husband and their daughter and decides to take in a couple teenagers from off the street. Her "mission" grows and she ends up with dozens of Ethiopian children of all ages, many who have been orphaned by AIDS.This book was written by an American mother of two Ethiopian children. The author spent time with the Ethiopian woman, Haregewoin in her home, and bore witness to children grieving the loss of their parents and families.The history of Ethiopia and the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Ethiopian people are also touched on in this book.
    • 4/5
      A widowed, middle-class woman grieves for her daughter who dies horribly from AIDS. More than a year later, depressed and still mourning, she enters a church to request a hut in the cemetery near her daughter’s grave – she has decided to go into seclusion and live out the rest of her life in grief. Instead of seclusion, however, the priest offers her something different – to become a foster mother to an orphaned teenage girl whose mother has died from AIDS. The decision to accept the priest’s offer is a turning point for Haregewoin Teferra and her life begins again.She had lost her daughter. And God sent her these precious children. - from There is No Me Without You, page 259 -There is No Me Without You is Haregewoin’s story told by award-winning journalist Melissa Fay Greene. When Haregewoin took in her first orphan, her heart was opened to the plight of her country’s children. Thousands of Ethiopians were dying from a virus with no cure, and leaving behind their children who were shunned because of fear. The options for these children were few – many ended up on the streets, starving, selling sex for food, or dying from the same disease which had taken their parents. Haregewoin Teferra was an angel of mercy. Very quickly she found her small home filled with children who had no other place to go.Greene provides the historical backdrop for the AIDS pandemic in Africa which later made its way to every country in the world. She explores the variety of theories about why AIDS arrived in the human population…the most compelling of these being the theory of serial passage – that a weak pathogenic virus is strengthened through mutation of the virus as it is injected from one host to another. In the case of AIDS, unsterile injections of vaccines in third world countries may have been the genesis of the disease whose roots have been found in African monkeys. I was shocked to learn that even as late as 2000, there was an estimated thirty to fifty billion unsterile injections occuring per year…even though a single-use autodestruct disposable syringe had already been developed. Why were these new syringes not being used? Of course, the reason is money.Global health experts agree that safer needles are a crucial step toward eradicating the iatrogenic spread of diseases, but where will the funding come from? WHO’s budget is insufficient and the big donors are not coming forward. - from There is no You Without Me, page 84 -Greene reveals the incredible poverty and poor delivery of medical services which has allowed AIDS to continue killing people by the thousands in Africa, while in the United States people are surviving the disease because of access to life saving drugs. She examines the greed of the pharmaceutical companies who initially charged upwards of $15,000 per year for the latest AIDS drugs, while production costs for those drugs were somewhere in the range of $200. Patent protection contributes to the inability for poor countries to acquire the medications needed to save their communities. When GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) patent on AZT expired in 2005, generic drug makers were able to provide the drug for $105 per year, a marked decrease from GSK’s price of $3893.64 per year. Despite the ability to now provide generic first line AIDS drugs to patients, multinational drug companies continue to fight for exclusive patents on the second line drugs…a move that makes them out of reach for poor countries.The statistics Greene shares with her readers is stunning and heartbreaking; the numbers staggering: * 81% of Ethiopia’s people live on less than two dollars a day; and 26% live on less than a dollar a day (page 12) * By 1999, UNAIDS estimated that 33 million people around the world were living with HIV/AIDS and that 16.3 million people worldwide had died from the disease. (page 113) * In 2000, AIDS had killed more than twenty-one million people, including four million children. More than thirteen million children had been orphaned by AIDS – twelve million of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty-five percent of those lived in two countries: Nigeria and Ethiopia. (page 20) * By 2000, Ethiopia had the world’s third-largest HIV/AIDS-infected population, trailing only India and South Africa. (page 117) * Spending on health per person in Ethiopia in 2002 was two dollars per year – across all of sub-Saharan Africa during that time, it was ten dollars per person per year (page 14) * In 2005, Ethiopia had 1,563,000 AIDS orphans; and 4,414,000 orphans from all causes – the second highest number in Africa (page 268) * In 2006, 4.7 million people were in immediate need of lifesaving AIDS drugs, but only 500,000 had access to them. During that time, sixty-six hundred Africans were dying each day of AIDS. In Zimbabwe, a UNICEF report stated that every twenty minutes a child either died from AIDS or was orphaned by the disease. (page 25)The hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic in Africa are the children who continue to be orphaned by this disease. They are also the most innocent of victims – often being born HIV positive because their mothers are ill with the disease.In North America and Europe, it had been discovered that triple-dose combination therapies, beginning twenty-eight weeks into a women’s pregnancy, could reduce transmission of HIV to the baby by 98 percent and save the mother, too. Public health campaigns, counseling, prenatal care, and ARV therapy for HIV-infected pregnant women in the United States reduced childhood infections to below 2 percent of births. In 2002, the number of new cases of pediatric AIDS was ninety-two. And in 2003, fifty-nine. But fewer than 10 percent of HIV-positive pregnant women in Africa had access to these drugs. So, in Ethiopia, the number of new pediatric cases in 2003 was roughly sixty thousand. - from There is No Me Without You, page 214 -In light of these kinds of statistics, Haregewoin’s mission to help the children of her country is even more poignant. Greene’s writing is compelling. She intersperses the facts with beautiful descriptions of Africa and its people. She captures the stories of individual children with a tenderness which made my heart ache. Many of the children mentioned in the book go on to find homes in adoptive families. Some do not.Perhaps the strongest element of this book was Greene’s portrayal of Haregewoin herself. No one is perfect, but it would have been easy for Greene to place Haregewoin on a pedestal – make her into a saint. Instead, Greene describes Haregewoin’s weaknesses, struggles and ultimate triumph through a lens of honesty. Times were not easy. Choices made were not always the right ones. And yet, imagine stepping forward to take on what Haregewoin Teferra took on. She was essentially a volunteer who lived, breathed, and slept her mission of saving children. Sadly, Haregewoin passed away from natural causes last year. Her work, however, continues to live on.There is No Me Without You is another one of those books which is hard to read. It is painful. At times it made me angry. There seems to be no end to the suffering in Africa. And yet, it is also a book which is important to read. There is hope within the pages – a glimpse of the humanity and kindness that can overcome the worst of situations. And for that reason, it is a book I recommend.
    • 5/5
      I can't imagine anyone reading this book and not being moved by the plight of those suffering from HIV/AIDS in Africa and all the children who are being left parentless. The author intertwines the true story of a woman who took in one orphan only to end up with 30 or 40 because she couldn't turn them away, and facts and statistics having to do with the HIV/AIDS situation in Africa. She particularly focuses on Ethiopia.We should all be ashamed of the way we have turned our heads as millions of people die. The drug companies are more concerned with their patents than they are of the lives of people even though they make astronomical profits every year. And western countries protect the drug companies instead of the ill. Some ideas of what could be done were presented, but personally, I just wanted to fly to Ethiopia and bring all those children home.
    • 5/5
      This is the book I seem to be recommending most often right now!! It is a fabulous interwoven work including personal narrative, stories about the children, and comprehensive information about how AIDS is currently being treated in Africa. A must read!!
    • 4/5
      A dense but (mostly) interesting account of the AIDs epidemic in Ethiopia and especially AIDs orphans. Greene provides a lot of technical background information about AIDs as well as detailed history about Ethiopia. The best parts are the more personal narratives about Haregewoin Teferra, a selfless woman who takes in AIDs orphans, and the children she helps.