We Are All the Same : A Story of a Boy's Courage and a Mother's Love

"The extraordinary story of Nkosi Johnson, the South African boy born with AIDS, whose stouthearted insistence that every child's life is important brought great change to his country and made Nkosi, in Nelson Mandela's words, "an icon of the struggle for life" for millions of people in Africa and around the world." "Nkosi's birthright was the cruelist imaginable: born into desperate poverty in an anonymous rural shanty-town, infected with the HIV virus in the womb of his ailing mother, he was given only a few years to live. But his mother found it within herself to commit a brave and selfless act before she died: to cross the chasm of race and class in South Africa and bring her ailing son to an AIDS hospice for white patients set up in an affluent section of the country's chapel. The hospice's founder, Gail Johnson, agreed to take Nkosi in, and when the hospice went bankrupt shortly thereafter, she raised the boy as her own. So began their journey together - a journey so incredible that by the time of Nkosi Johnson's death from AIDS, the work he had done in his twelve years was such that his obituary ran on the front pages of newspapers around the world." "Nkosi Johnson did not live to tell his own story, but one writer whose life he changed took up the work of telling it for him. In Jim Wooten's hands, We Are All The Same is a testament to the strength of the human spirit, even as it bears witness to the scope of the tragedy that is unfolding in Africa and around the world, cutting down millions of boys and girls like Nkosi Johnson before they can reach their promise. Five million more human beings around the world contracted HIV in the last year alone, a number that stuns us; perhaps the story of a remarkable child's life can help us open our minds and hearts to the reality of the calamity we face."--BOOK JACKET.

Jim Wooten is the senior correspondent for ABC News-'s Nightline and a former bureau chief and White House correspondent for The New York Times. He is the recipient of a John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism.