new world
witness

The Things
that We Saw
Vicky Aryenyo’s story has travelled the world through a Cannes award-winning film and a stirring witness delivered at the Meeting of Rimini. In February, she accepted an invitation to come to America, and told her story to audiences in New York, Boston, and Washington, DC.

by Dino D’Agata

Nine:thirty pm. An otherwise placid Friday outside the Catholic University of America’s Gowan Hall, which houses the university’s School of Nursing. Three students–one, a Physics major, the other two, Engineering majors–stop and ask me what all of these people are standing there for, and I explain, “We’re CL, and tonight a woman from Uganda came and spoke to us about her experience of facing HIV/AIDS after having met Meeting Point International, one of our charitable initiatives. I’m sorry you guys didn’t know about it.”
“That’s too bad,” one of them replies. “I’ve heard of CL. It’s cool.”
The three of them were what one might describe as onlookers outside one of the houses in Galilee where Jesus had worked a miracle–that is, three who were unable to see directly, but who shared the enthusiasm because they could see in the faces of the crowd that something had happened, despite not having heard the woman recount how (her own words, spoken while holding up a plastic water bottle), she’d been “recycled.”

Gratitude. Reading about Vicky Aryenyo in Traces (see vol. 10, n. 8 [September], 2008, pp. 14-17), seeing her in Greater: Defeating AIDS, reading her witness at the Meeting, following Fr. Carrón’s indication of her as a prime example of Christian witness–all of these things simply do not do justice to what happens when Vicky Aryenyo enters a room and speaks. The level of expectation (recall the Acts of the Apostles in which the rejoicing in one city reached “fever pitch”) was set when over 65 students from DeMatha, a local boys’ high school, raised a red and blue “Welcome Vicky” banner, and the room rose to its feet as a dark-skinned woman with high cheekbones, eyes that focused on things with directness and certainty, meticulously braided hair with copper highlights running through it, walked in, wearing a lavender sweater set with accompanying scarf that was highly flattering–downright elegant against her dark brown skin–along with brown velour slacks and white tennis shoes that gave her the casual air of an unassuming graduate student. Vicky drew her hands together and bowed in gratitude for the welcome, and then demurely took a seat next to Barry Stohlman, leader of the DC community, almost cowering next to him for protection. Stohlman, his voice somewhat diffident in front of her (anyone who knows Barry, a cabinet maker and father, knows he is not one you would describe as “diffident”), read a quote from St. Paul (2 Cor 1-8) from the Liturgy of the Hours: “We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.”
It was this affliction, this “carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body,” that Vicky Aryenyo personified–and for awhile, a number of us in the audience were frightened as she broke into coughing spells, once even kneeling behind the podium where she stood, leaning down on a stool. But as the evening went on and Monica Ciantia–who was raised in Uganda by her missionary parents and who, through a variety of bake sales to raise money, bought the plane ticket to bring Vicky to New York to speak at her own high school and then before audiences in nearby cities–gave her small honey packets to suck, Vicky’s voice cleared up, and one had the impression that, had it taken her a week to soothe her nervous vocal chords, the audience would have been willing to go without food for days. “In front of my students,” Monica (a teacher at York Preparatory School in Manhattan) recounts, “I sensed more and more the need to propose something beautiful, someone who could talk to them about hope, about why life is worth living even if it is hard. I heard Vicky had been invited to the CLU [CL University Students] Advent Retreat in Italy. So I asked my principal and he said, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’”
At Monica’s prompting, the students raised $1,000 for Vicky’s ticket. Some even gave donations, and at the dress-down day on which Vicky spoke, the faculty raised more than $700. From there, Vicky went on to Boston, New Jersey, and, finally, Washington, DC.
At the outset, she recounted her troubled childhood in a broken home in which she “lost the love of her father”–something that a lot of Americans would not find extraordinary. This was followed by a marriage to a man who, probably because he knew he was infected with HIV and had infected her, had given her an ultimatum: either abort their third child or their marriage would end. “I could not commit murder,” she told the audience, in a hushed tone.
And so he left. Soon came the realization that her youngest son, Brian (then 4, now 16), was having bouts of tuberculosis while she herself was presenting with Herpes zoster infections (shingles, in common parlance)–all the dreaded events that bring one to understand that more is present than a run-of-the-mill cold or flu. It culminated in her being bedridden with odorous discharges of pus and blood coming from her body, with the skin of her feet falling off in scales “like a fish,” and Vicky herself unable to tolerate her own stench. She described the accompanying despair and hopelessness that made her uninterested in getting out of bed and uninterested in the possibility of obtaining medications either for herself or for her son. “I told God, ‘Either cure me or give me death.’ It was one or the other,” she recounted.
Talking about what happened within what happened, about her relationship with God and His merciful touch, kept the audience glued to their seats and made possibly more than half of them line up afterwards to approach where she sat and hold her hand, kiss her cheek, hug her, be hugged by her (she got up and walked through the crowd until she reached everyone).

“You’re worth”. In Vicky–who, from a bed where she believed she was dying, where she had told God she either wanted to die or be miraculously cured, for whom there was no in-between in her home where Brian, her son, was not getting any medication for his HIV because his mother couldn’t find a reason to get out of bed–in her you see a mysterious vital force, an extraordinariness where the inexplicable thing (which, in her case, came to her first in the face of Rose Busingye) becomes flesh and a person who has given up hope is told a fact (by Rose) that makes her unable to sleep one night: “Vicky, don’t you see you’re worth more than your illness?” It was something she listened to and cast aside at first, until that one night, when she could not remove it from her consciousness, because no one had ever spoken to her that way before; no one had ever communicated that type of certainty to her–not after the broken marriage of her parents, not after the departure and offense of her unfaithful husband, for whom, with no more bitterness, she eventually wished the same beauty of an encounter that she herself had with the face of the living Christ through the presence, the witness, of Rose. “I don’t know where he is now,” she told the audience. “If only he can meet what I have met,” she notes in the present tense.
What does it mean to say, “If only he can meet what I have met” ? It was through a human witness, Rose, that this “inexplicable” entered her experience–a completely human presence, a vehicle in the flesh that Jesus Himself chose, a woman, a nurse–and who thus was able to say it again, having become for Vicky that very vehicle of Him. And so, on a Friday night in Washington, DC, some years later, those who touched Vicky were taken by this “Something that comes before” once again, an exceptional humanity through which this Glorious Inexplicable made Himself known once again–not according to our dreams but as a fulfillment no one expected, a fulfillment that surprised us with its correspondence to our need. This is the method Fr. Giussani left us, the one Carròn explained in January at our National Diaconia (the assembly for CL responsibles of North America), which Giussani was so adamantly concerned–even as he was dying–that we follow. Writing these words, I feel one with the man who wrote, “We have seen with our own eyes, we have touched with our own hands, the Word of life.”

The Force of the Encounter. This encounter was a fact that, in the end, resurrected not only Vicky’s hope, but her body also, along with her son’s–to the point where she told God, “I will go all over the world telling of Your mercy to me,” after understanding perhaps that, between hoping and giving up hope, between handing God your dreams and expecting Him to fulfill your hope in the form you dictate, another thing happens: God reveals His very concrete face to you, and you realize there is a possibility other than either healing or dying–the only possibility, in fact, that corresponds to what your heart was made for: meeting Him in the flesh in this life.
For almost an hour after her speech, students, adults, and parents crowded her in, spoke of their problems, their hopes, their aspirations, their desires. Vicky gave back an embrace, a pat on the head, a handshake to the more inhibited, a look that told them, “I am with you; trust me, He is real, He changed me.”
It was this possibility, for those who listened to her, that made them seek to touch her physically, the way the woman with the hemorrhage in the Gospel knew she could just touch His cloak; it was why, later that night, two GS students who attended wrote, “I have been recycled” on their Facebook profiles; why that night I could not sleep without stopping by Wanda’s house, where Vicky was staying (11 pm this time, not 4 in the afternoon!) to say goodnight to her before she had tea and went to bed; why the next morning when she looked at all of us and said, “Come for coffee!” because she herself was certain of what we all wanted; why Thom Black (a friend and schoolteacher who had driven Vicky down from New York) and I raced home and grabbed my friend Ezio and said, “Wanda invited us for coffee, let’s go!” and Ezio left the bread he’d bought for the house that week and grabbed his coat…
…Why the following day at our monthly School of Community assembly, everyone spoke of the encounter with Vicky in relation to the point on hope. “In front of these desires, we can be tempted to dream,” Maria Teresa Landi stated, in light of what had occurred. “Or we can totally entrust ourselves to this Presence–risking, knowing He’ll answer as promised.”
Alessandro Maffioli spoke of how, in Lourdes, people were certain that Our Lady had appeared because of how different St. Bernadette looked.
“Vicky,” Maria Teresa commented, “was generated by the gaze of Rose. She kept looking, and she became that gaze.”
And Sue McGuire of Virginia, a former paralegal who now works as a secretary, stated how Vicky’s presence made it possible for her to see that “He answers us through the people He has given to us in the immediate circumstances. The more I look at myself as a little child like this, the more He answers me in spades. I’m just really happy to see things in a new way–not as somebody who was shorted (Vicky was shorted)–but now she, and I, have an abundance.”