The book The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis

The book The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis is a non-fiction novel based on realities of the world. Debroah Ellis was able to bring aknowledgement to her readers of the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Africa as well as poverty through her characters. The story takes place in Malawi, Africa where Binti, her sister Junie, and her brother lose their dad to AIDS. The siblings have to deal with their loss of their father to a deadly disease while they are striped from all of their belongings, seperated from each other, and are discriminated against because of the disease their father died from. The author brought out many emotions in me while reading the book. I was angry to see the siblings relatives take everything they own, sad to see that Junie had resorted to prositiution to attain money for her family and as a result contracted AIDS continuing the vicious cycle. I was also very upset that such terrible things are happening in our world. I also was inspired that despite all that Binti went through she was able to be the rock for her family and reunite them as a family.

Being Sick by Debroah Ellis The public hospitals in Malawi and Zambia are overcrowded. There are not enough beds, so many patients have to sleep on mats on the floor between the beds. Sometimes patients have to share a single bed with a complete stranger. There aren’t enough nurses, because AIDS affects health care workers, too. Family members of the sick person usually stay at the hospital with them, often sleeping under their bed.

I'm very brave. I feel bravest when I'm with my friends. My mother gets scared, though. I don’t remember very much about when my father died. I was quite small, and you don’t always remember what happens to you when you’re small. I think he suffered from bad headaches, and also he ran out of blood. When he was well, he was very kind to me and would let me ride on his shoulders, or just let me sit beside him while he talked to other men. He was a soldier. He was very strong, when he wasn’t sick. I’d like to be a soldier, too. My mother says the older I get, the more I look like him. My mother says he died of AIDS, so she tries to stop other people getting AIDS. The house we live in now is smaller than where we used to live. Our old house had running water and electricity, but this house doesn’t have anything. After my father died, his family came and took everything we had — our house, our furniture, and our money. My mother is trying to get everything back for us, but she says she needs money to go to court, and we don’t have money. There a lot of children living in this house. They are children whose parents have died, and they have no place to go. I don’t know where my mother finds them all, but she does, and she brings them here. She says every child should be taken care of. They are my new brothers and sisters.

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Julie De. Cintio August 1, 2006 x x x My goal for this project was to bring attention to the very important issues of the people living in Malawi, Africa. I think my pictures were carefully chosen to depict the terrible things happening in Africa.