300,000 Young People Rebel Against Promiscuity
June 16, 2001 – Youth Day (True Love Waits)
Somehow beauty arrests the emotions. And what is more beautiful than the youth?
Somehow vibrancy sparks the imagination. And what is more vibrant than the youth?
But too many of our youth are robbed of their beauty, their vibrancy. Too early. Too young. Mangled victims of society’s sickness.
A goat with its gawky kid stumbles away from the one-windowed, steaming hut. Inside people are singing. People are praying, pleading, supplicating. A knock on the door brings wide-eyed children with protruding bellies scuttling from nearby dwellings, and then out pour the ample prayer women, carefully dressed men of the community, and, lastly, a thin young man wrapped in a blanket. A condemned young man. Home from the city. Home to die.
Every day about 1,700 South Africans contract HIV. Some predict that a person will die of AIDS every minute in our country.
But it isn’t only HIV that tears the hearts of people in that misted-up hut. AIDS isn’t the only cause of children growing up fatherless, of young people’s dreams being dumped, of wrinkled old brows and greyed heads sagging in despair. Even when it doesn’t lead to any STD, never mind HIV, moral decay is mauling a people. In the streets and parks, bioscopes and discos, wherever human hearts are found, it stalks seductively, this enemy of social cohesion. Prickling emotions and demobilizing logic, lust acts and people suffer.
300,000 young South Africans have rebelled against promiscuity by signing a pledge to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Saved sex, they say, saves the beauty of love for the security of a single bond. Saved sex, they say, builds trust and honour; it protects hearts, minds and bodies. They name their movement True Love Waits in English, Ware Liefde Wag in Afrikaans, Uthando Lweqiniso Luyalinda in Zulu, and, since over 100 countries boast members, many more.
Their mission is to warn those young men in the cities before it’s too late … before they too return to their little houses, their wrapping blankets … to die.