Author aims to educate about deadly disease

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There are over 28 million people in the world with HIV and AIDS, with one half of all new infections occurring in young people under the age of 25.

Grim statistics that most people don't want to think about.

But for author Darlene Meeds, of Saskatoon, who had spent years watching kids sick and dying in the streets of Vancouver as an environmental health officer, thinking about helping people cope with AIDS just wasn't enough. With a life-long dream of becoming a writer and wanting to reach out and make a difference, prevention through education became her focus.

Meeds is the author of The Journey Home, which tells the story of Danny, a young First Nation's man dying of AIDS. He wants to come home, back to his Kokum and younger brother, to make the most of what time they have left together.

There's no surprise ending when you're dying of AIDS. Danny has made some bad choices. He is a man with a drug abuse problem who shared dirty needles and had unprotected sex to help support his drug habit. He could have become infected either way.

The Journey Home is the story of a family's tragedy and how one man dealt with that tragedy by promising his grandmother's Creator that he would use the last few months of his life to make a difference to his younger brother Nathan.

Danny was someone given a second chance to make things right by sharing the special ways of their culture before his soul left to take it's final journey on the spirit trail.

And above all, making sure that Nathan would never do drugs.

Part of her goal in writing this book, explained Meeds, was to send out this message, a gentle way of saying, Hey, it's everywhere, even a kid can get it.

The Journey Home is a sensitive and evocative book that gives you the straight goods, a real eye opener that is both believable and accessible.

The colorful ink and pencil drawings by Cree artist Gary Natomagan really hit home. The drawings really show us what Meeds calls, the importance of love and family and how someone dying of AIDS would need all the love and support he could get from his family and friends.

"When I was writing the story, I was looking for an artist with the right feeling for the Native culture, someone who could capture the soul in the eyes of his people and animals, and the pictures that he has created for this book are some amazingly sensitive portraits," said Meeds.