Broken Frontier

Nearly a year has passed since I first listened to the Disinformation podcast featuring an interview with Alan Moore where he discussed the documentary, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, a collaborative project between him and director/producer DeZ Vylenz. At the end of the interview, Moore mentioned a performance he was giving for a Romanian charity fighting against the country’s pediatric HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The charity turned out to be Love Light Romania, and after almost a year of long-distance collaboration with the charity’s founders, Ron and Josephine “Jo” Jowett, I’ve written a feature story for A&U magazine (American’s AIDS magazine) to be released later this month. The story will also be featured among many others at the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

Here is a brief excerpt to pique your interest:

“It’s the little details of the Cernavoda orphanage that stand out in Ron and Josephine ‘Jo’ Jowett’s memory: the tattered teddy-bear wallpaper, the faded Disney cartoon murals. These recollections have come to symbolize the sights they witnessed during a trip made to Romania in 1997 delivering aid—children left to suffer and die in the final stages of AIDS.

Cernavoda’s state-run orphanage stood as a monument to Romania’s communist past, and within its walls were the victims of the country’s failed regime. The Jowetts witnessed dying orphans, all under the age of 12: they were sick, underfed, and many of them disabled. The children were confined to their cots, left in their own human waste. ‘Once, I even saw a huge rat running around… I would not have wanted even my dog to live in there,’ Jo recalls.

The orphanage’s bottom floor housed the AIDS ward. There the Jowetts discovered 24 children; their health was failing and their minds were scarred from confinement. None of the orphans had access to medication and all were malnourished. It was a sight the couple couldn’t turn away from…”

To learn more about Love Light Romania, please visit the organization’s official website. And don’t forget to look for the July issue of A&U to read the entire story!

I also want to extend a special thanks to Alan Moore for indirectly bringing all of this to my attention to begin with. He was the catalyst that made this story possible.