Area residents comfort, teach AIDS Orphans in AfricaBy Kelsey Volkmann, Examiner Staff Writer, Tuesday, August 7, 2007[1]
For other articles by Kelsey Volkmann go here.
One child was found under the bushes, one in a tire and another on the street. All of them alone. Their parents had died of AIDS.
In Namibia, Africa, along the Zambezi River, where hippopotamuses and crocodiles roam, 4,000 to 5,000 children have lost their families to the virus.
It’s these orphans that Carroll County residents hugged and taught this summer at the Children of Mount Zion Village, an orphanage established by Mount Zion United Methodist Church in Bel Air. Twenty members of the Calvary United Methodist Church in Mount Airy, which has donated to the children for years, traveled to Namibia this summer to provide comfort and teach them science, math, guitar, reading, dancing and drawing. For some, this was a return trip to the region.
“We saw this little boy come in last year as a 9-month-old baby, and he was weaker than a newborn,” said Sarah Dorrance, a Calvary seminary student who visited for the second time this year.
“He would have died. It’s a blessing to now see him running around, hugging and playing games.”
The church volunteers returned home last month, but one, Kevin Meadows, remained behind to teach in a region where more than 40 percent of the population has HIV or AIDS.
On his blog, Meadows describes the orphanage’s location in a region called the Caprivi Strip, an intersection of trade routes connecting several southern African countries.
“Despite its favorable location, scenic beauty and exotic wildlife, it also has one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates among adults in Namibia and the whole of Africa,” he wrote.
kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com
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For other posts and information on “Soundtrack” on Children of Zion Namibia Africa, please click here.
Click here for Children of Zion web site information: 20070319 Children of Zion Namibia Africa information
For more information go to: http://www.childrenofzionvillage.org/
For a blog on the Children of Zion initiative, to “Kevin Meadows in Namibia” - http://www.kevinmeadows.us/
[1] Note this article is not online electronically and can only be found in the pdf version of the paper. Since the article is not available easily, I have taken the liberty to keyboard the article into a MS Word document and place the entire article online…
To find the article in pdf go to:
http://bapaper.examiner.com/edition/carroll/?haspdf=1
Under the current edition pull down, go to August 7th, 2007 and then go to page 05-Local
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