AIDS fundraising project has obscu(red) flaws

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a T-shirt at the Gap. It’s a great shirt, it’s red and it says inspi(red) on the front of it. It’s part of that (red) campaign, you know, Project Red, where some of the profits from buying something red goes to purchase and distribute anti-retroviral medication “to our brothers and sisters dying of AIDS in Africa,” as the (red) manifesto reads at www.joinred.com.

Last fall, I spent a month in Lesotho – a small country completely land-bound by South Africa – volunteering at a newspaper called the Public Eye.

The United Nations Development Program ranks 177 countries by a human poverty index that takes into consideration a resident’s chance for a healthy life, education and a good standard of living. Lesotho is No. 149 on this scale, and the United States is 10th.

Lesotho is a very poor country. It’s estimated that every third person has HIV or AIDS. Some villages in rural parts of the South African region are now what aid organizations call “child headed” – all the adults in town have died from HIV or AIDS.

Project Red was launched while I was in Lesotho. U2’s Bono and other celebrities and international businesses, including Motorola, got behind the campaign – and some of the T-shirts are produced in Lesotho.

Back in Spokane, it was a strange feeling to pick up a shirt and have the label say: Made in Lesotho, from African grown cotton.

As I wrote on my blog from Africa, I really want Project Red to be good news. I want it to bring health and prosperity to some of the friends I made in that remote part of the planet.

But let’s not get carried away.

You see, most of the textile factories in Lesotho are not owned by Africans; they are owned by companies based in China.

Asian countries are moving their production facilities to developing nations in Africa to avoid trade restrictions and tariffs imposed on major markets such as the United States and the European Union. Developing nations can, in most cases, sell anything and everything they can produce to industrialized nations without any trade restrictions.

At the Chinese-owned textile plant in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, about 98 percent of the workers are female. They make about $100 a month, which, even in Lesotho, is starvation pay. I paid about $30 for my Project Red T-shirt.

Libuseng Nyaka, a reporter at the Public Eye, wrote a story about female textile workers while I was there.

She found that many of the factory workers either work as street prostitutes or provide sexual favors to the cabdrivers they depend on for transportation to make ends meet.

You guessed it: At least one-third of the female factory workers also have HIV or AIDS.

So follow this circle: The women in Lesotho are making T-shirts, which are being sold in other parts of the world, to help the women in Lesotho treat a disease they are exposed to in the first place mostly because they aren’t paid a living wage.

And that’s where I have to ask: Is that ethical? Aren’t we just exploiting people in Africa for cheap clothing, throwing in a little aid on the side to make us feel better?

Can anyone with a clear conscience buy these T-shirts and feel all warm and happy about helping our “brothers and sisters” in Africa?

On Project Red’s Web site, there’s a calculator that adds up your (red) stuff and tells you how much you are helping Africa.

I also bought my son a T-shirt that says bo(red). He wanted the one that reads hamme(red), but I didn’t think that was appropriate in middle school.

Anyhow, the two T-shirts release a donation to Africa that will provide one month of treatment for a person living with HIV.

And that’s better than doing nothing, right? Right?

I haven’t convinced myself yet.