It is unusual for us to devote so much of an issue to a single story, but the AIDS plague in Africa is that rare news event: it is horrific beyond imagination, it is unfolding before our eyes, and there is something you can do to help.
For Johanna McGeary, who wrote the cover and spent a month traveling through South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, the hardest part was breaking through the walls of stigma and silence that surround the disease. "It was excruciating to keep asking, 'Do you know why you're sick? How did you get AIDS?' I've covered wars for a long time, and you always feel like a ghoul when you try to record the facts and emotions of someone else's tragedy. But in one way, this seemed worse, because everything seemed so hopeless. In war, you can always tell yourself that one day this will be over. But this story has no end in sight."
Still, Johanna was struck by how many people in Africa with so little helped those with even less, and how far a few dollars can go. "You could keep an AIDS orphan in school for a year with a donation of $50, and that makes the difference between having a future and having none."
World editor Joshua Cooper Ramo came to understand the problems of AIDS in South Africa particularly well in December, when he traveled to KwaZulu-Natal to work in a swamped but heroic AIDS hospice. Working as a volunteer instead of as a journalist gave him an unusually close look at what it was like to live with and die of AIDS. "I'm a big believer that if you see a crime being committed and you don't do something about it, you are as guilty as the criminal," he says. "What's going on in Africa right now is a crime. When the history of our times is written, future generations will be astonished that we watched the death of 40 million people--at least half of which we could have prevented--and did nothing."
Picking the photojournalist for this project was easy: Jim Nachtwey has shot wars and famines and revolutions for TIME since 1984. When I called him last week to congratulate him on his photos, he was on assignment in Jakarta. He faxed his thoughts about what this story meant to him, and I'd like to share with you what he wrote:
"The drama of the AIDS epidemic is more subtle than the older calamities that have rocked Africa. It plays itself out behind closed doors. People are suffering silently, in hospices and hospital wards and in isolation in their homes. The front-line troops in this war are the gentle souls who have committed themselves to the saintly task of attending to the dying. As I accompanied caregivers on their rounds, I was awed by their selfless, unsung devotion. Where hope no longer existed, they replaced it with comfort and dignity.