Two of the adult staff, and a dozen youth volunteers of the WAIT team, traveled to Cheonan, South Korea for the Interreligious Peace Sports Festival 2004 to teach the athletes of 53 nations about HIV and AIDS prevention.

The teen volunteers helped introduce the athletes to the various aspects of the Sports Festival in some seven orientation sessions, and set the example of learning about other’s cultures, languages and religions with their participation. They also performed at the first of the nightly Cultural Programs, sharing the life-saving message of stopping AIDS by making good personal choices, especially abstinence, and by using one’s talents to spread the message to others.

They performed again at two larger events: the Global Family Festival, and the Opening Convention of World CARP, each time to a very diverse and international audience.

They taught the youth participants of the IPSF in some peer education material, and they shared informally on the buses, in the dining halls, and while supporting the athletes in the competitions.

At one point, the soccer team of Singapore and the WAIT members sang and learned each other’s songs and dance moves on the bus back from the Cheonan Sports Complex. Music and dance bridged the gaps of geography and nationality.

Why educate international athletes?

AIDS is truly the plague of our age, affecting virtually every nation of the world. But, for most sports competitions, including the Olympics, the sole effort made to address this human holocaust is to hand out condoms—some 70,000 in the Sydney Olympics quickly ran out, so another 20,000 were made available…but were still not enough to meet the demand, according to the reports. In Salt Lake City, they made sure that wouldn’t happen: there, 250,000 condoms were given out. (Reported by Paul Hochman, in a Special Report “Let the Games Begin,” in the Men’s Journal, August 2004)

Coincidentally, the countries reporting the highest rates of sexual activity are those in the former Eastern Bloc: Hungary, Bulgaria and the Russian Federation all hovering at the 150 rate per year, with the hedonistic USA a distant fourth at 118. Russians report that nearly 40 percent of the population are likely to have sex on the first date. (2003 Global Sex Survey) Small wonder that the nation where HIV is spreading the most rapidly is…you guessed it…the Russian Federation. In the year 2000, there were 20 HIV infections per 100,000. Three years later, that had skyrocketed to180 per 100,000—a nine hundred percent increase in three years. Right now, one in every hundred Russians is infected with HIV. (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 10/31/03) If the current rates of infection continue, that could be three in every hundred next year, and nine in every hundred the year after.

The role that athletes play in representing their nation is enormous. Athletes gain prestige for their country by competing, but they also create the reputation for their country by how they act when they are in an international arena. When athletes choose to use sex as a pastime, they convey that attitude to their own nation’s youth, and to that of other nations.

It is noteworthy, then, that the IPSF officially promoted abstinence as both a universally shared moral value of all the faith groups competing there, but also as a healthy lifestyle that better fits the goal of true athleticism. Since WAIF has consistently urged abstinence and lifetime partnership as the “best practices” for preventing the spread of HIV, and since all the youth involved with the WAIT team have made this their own personal standard, it was a good fit for them to bring that message out to the men and women who seek to create peace through friendly competition, cultural sharing, and religious understanding.

Future Implications

As a result of the conference, eight countries invited the WAIT team to come to their nation and help teach the youth there the same message. The youth of every nation are needed to lead a positive revolution against HIV. The worn-out, failed policies of laissez-faire appeasement towards sex slavery, promiscuity, and the drug trade must be replaced. The examples of Uganda, with the ABC policy (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condoms) and the U.S. where even a very poorly funded abstinence education movement has brought about a huge decrease in teen sexual activity (from 54 percent of teens having had sex to 46 percent—an 8 percent decrease in 10 years time).

If athletes, educators and performing artists can join together with faith leaders to create a new, hopeful initiative to stop AIDS by upholding the innate value and the unique gifts of each human being, we can not only see a decrease and termination of this deadly plague, but a new sense of the dignity of all humans. This is obviously a win-win solution. I invite readers to join us in this exciting effort.