Editor's note: Courier columnist Karris Golden spent two weeks traveling in cities and rural areas in South Africa as part of a study seminar focused on the global AIDS/HIV pandemic, women's issues and racial justice. Below is a reflection on her experience.

I am HIV positive.

It was hard for me to type those words, because I'm afraid of what you will think of me. Although it infuriates me that stigma is associated with disclosing HIV and AIDS status, I nonetheless cringe at the idea of personal involvement.

It is time I faced this truth: As long as HIV/AIDS exists in the world, my life will be touched by it. I believe we all face this reality. We either have HIV/AIDS, know someone who has it, lost someone or several someones to it or fear someone we love will get it. We are all HIV positive; the world has AIDS.

Despite assumptions, AIDS hasn't gone away in the United States. In particular, new cases are growing rapidly among U.S. young people. We think of AIDS as an "Africa problem," but we share many common problems with sub-Saharan Africa. Chief among these is that heavy stigma makes Africans and Americans alike afraid to talk about AIDS, get tested or disclose their HIV/AIDS status.

The World Bank and other sources note that poverty may play the biggest role in HIV/AIDS susceptibility and mortality.

Among the issues is that poor people lack access to life-prolonging drugs.

In South Africa, for example, a low- to no-income AIDS patient must literally be near death to receive free antiretroviral medications. Once the person is "well" again, the costly ARVs are taken away.

Another sad similarity: I spent two weeks talking with South African women of all ages who lament that HIV/AIDS, sex and other related issues aren't talked about at church.

This is true in the United States. We don't talk about sex. We don't talk about what poverty does to gender roles and sexual relationships. We don't talk about sexually transmitted infections and other related topics.

But young people are having sex - in large numbers - and they are contracting STIs, including HIV/AIDS.

In addition to the discomfort associated with talking about sex, we also are afraid of being judged in our faith communities.

Maybe sex is an inappropriate topic for church, but I don't think so. Not when people are dying. Not when the U.S. teen-pregnancy rate is skyrocketing. And as one of my American travel companions says, "We're constantly telling kids not to have sex, but we don't tell them why."

While I don't technically have HIV/AIDS, I have learned the disease affects me, especially because I say I am a person of faith.

I feared discussing HIV/AIDS - and sex in general - with my daughter and other young people. I wanted keep AIDS/HIV at arm's length.

In reality, my conscious memory is shaped by a world where AIDS exists. I was a child in 1981 when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded the first infection related to what we now call AIDS. Unlike my mother's generation, most of my lifetime - and perhaps my daughter's - probably will include this incurable illness.

Studying in South Africa awakened me to the problem at home. We must stop thinking of illnesses as fads; HIV/AIDS lives among us and has not gone away.