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Building Blocks 2: October 9 - 23, 2003 |
I spent two weeks in South Africa and Zimbabwe getting things ready for the first session of camp that will start in late December. My purpose was to make sure that our partner organization, HIVSA, a clinic that deals with the psycho-social effects of HIV and AIDS on women and the family, was getting geared up to administer camp and that contacts were being made with campers and counselors to get commitments from all in timely fashion.
t was a great relief to discover by working with them on the site that HIVSA is a spectacularly effective and talented partner. Their personnel are bright, dedicated and quick to learn and appreciate the new challenges that starting a camp bring.
HIVSA has been consistently in the forefront of HIV/AIDS activities and has been visited by Queen Elizabeth, President Chirac, Treasury Secretary O'Neill, Bill Clinton, Swedish Foreign Secretary, the late Anna Lindh, and Bono, among many others. They are known to be pre-eminent in their field.
While they are loathe to separate themselves by titles, Michelle Schorn, our Camp Director, works at the Clinic as head of special projects. She loves the challenge of a new effort and is particularly well-suited by temperament and organizational ability to doing this one.
Levelle McKinney, a friend from Reston, asked if he could accompany me on the trip. An amateur photographer and videographer and an African-American, he wanted to document the beginnings of World Camp and wanted some connection to his own roots.
While I don't think I "performed" for him, I was a bit more conscious of how I was articulating thoughts and communicating with people when I thought the camera was on. He also kept me more constantly upbeat by his enthusiasm as to what he was experiencing and appreciating.
We visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg and the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto, named for a student who was killed in the 1976 Soweto student demonstrations that, more than anything else, mobilized the Black population to work toward the end of apartheid. We visited homes in squatter areas. We ate at a Soweto Restaurant and visited a home now open as a B&B. Realize that this is the same Soweto of which the two counselor applicants we interviewed, one White, one Black, had never visited and were afraid to come to even for a job interview (but they did).
We drove around the Soweto area and to a couple of cemeteries. The cemeteries are territorial and if you're a taxpayer in a district you get a very favorable rate at the local cemetery. One that we stopped at wasn't even in Soweto, but was filled with newly dug graves waiting for the burials. There must have been 40 in two rows. Michelle said it's been this bad for months and is getting worse.
The only good thing seems to be that the tribal chiefs have told people not to spend so much money on the dead. Before that, the funeral was the biggest thing in a person's life or after.
We had dinner with an Amherst graduate from 1988, a Black South African, now in business for himself, who was eager and excited about the project and wanted to help give back something to people in the area he had moved from. There was a feeling of some guilt for having deprived the area of brains and money and the sense of obligation to help his people.
We visited the site for our first camp and the site for subsequent camps.
We have decided not to build at this point, which hinders our expanded and extended use of a facility for community groups, weekend retreats, and for such sub-groups as mothers and daughters, sports clinics, orphanages, etc., but we believe the advantages of not having additional administrative responsibilities outweigh the advantages. Building comes after sustainability is achieved.
The sites are both much nicer than I had expected. The housing at Stoney Ridge, a retreat center started by a religious organization that I think is Protestant had simple, but quite ample rooms, dormitory-style, for the campers and counselors. The outdoor facilities are a little compact and there is not a lot of space between them. For example, the ball field, swimming pool and basketball court are all together, but for children coming out of the urban slums it will look great.
The other one, Bosco, is a former Catholic school that has six soccer fields, a large swimming pool, a nice ropes course, two tennis courts, several basketball and volleyball courts, and lots of land. The housing is less nice than Stoney Ridge, but it will only be noticed by the staff, which will have less privacy and space.
The South African school holiday system is different by province. In ours (Gauteng), the vacations are December-January for 6 weeks; March-April for 2 weeks; and June-July for 3 weeks. We will use Bosco for the camps starting in March. We figure we will have space to have five sessions, thus touching about 750 children a year just at the camps. We will also have Kids Clubs that will meet weekly once the children are home from camp. We expect those will attract campers and their friends.
In an effort to learn about the community we went to a support group meeting at HIVSA of 13 women and one man who are HIV positive. There were three facilitators, all but one of whom was also HIV positive. One of the women had learned just minutes before that she was HIV positive. A second one had never been to the group before.
They were eager to hear about camp and they spoke English well. I decided to tell them that it was fine to talk in whatever language they wanted as we didn't want to cramp their communication, so they did. Not a lot of English was spoken, but it was a powerful experience.
One woman told of being tested but not finding out that she was positive until after the birth of her daughter. She was probably improperly tested. The baby died after two months. Her husband, also positive, left her, and she had to cope.
They were a wonderful source of strength to each other and pulled no punches with the woman whose first time it was (they were gentle with the woman who had just found out). Their message seems to be: don't blame someone for it as you'll waste your energy. Just get on with your life. HIV is not AIDS. It is the virus that can cause AIDS if you don't deal with it correctly; but you can lead a long life with HIV.
A lot of the message seems to be to take responsibility for the rest of your life; share your strength with the group and any friends or family who will talk to you; have safe sex and don't be bullied by anyone into doing otherwise. When others are stigmatizing you and want nothing to do with you, contact others in the group as a source of strength.
They were a wonderful group and we had a lot of fun, ending their session with songs and dances, which they were happy to see me stumble through.
We went from there to a Rotary Club luncheon at a fancy private club. Imagine the leap! The Club members gave us a warm reception and were far more eager to participate than I had imagined. All I wanted was them to be our local pair for the Herndon Rotary, which has been very supportive and encouraging. When I told the group in Johannesburg that all we wanted from them was to sign on as a partner, they were dumbfounded and wouldn't accept that. Rotary does much more. I think I might have made a cultural miscue in the Rotary culture by implying that Rotary would engage in a project without putting in money and effort! I quickly recovered and told them I would gratefully accept whatever they could bring to the project.
That same night we went to a premiere of a marvelous advocacy documentary about AIDS throughout the world, called "A Closer Walk," directed by Robert Bilheimer, as American. There was incredible and hearty-wrenching footage from South Africa, Uganda, Ukraine, and India. It pulled no punches and dealt with sexually transmitted HIV, shared needle transmission and homosexual transmission.The statistics are quite staggering, and 90% of the HIV/AIDS cases are in Africa, largely southern Africa. It was a call to action and had interviews with many top medical people, as well as world leaders such as Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama. Very powerful.
We also met with the local Discovery Channel (more literally, their Global Education Fund) representative and saw her in action as a teacher trainer of some outstanding tapes involving life skills. I spoke to the CNN Bureau Chief, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, but couldn't meet with her due to pressing stories. She is interested in the problem and has had extensive contact with some local orphanages, one of which will be sending some children to camp. I spoke with the local editor of "O", Oprah Winfrey's magazine as they have done coverage of AIDS and children and was referred to their Chicago office for possible support.
We went to Zimbabwe where we had, perhaps, our most powerful experience. Bulawayo is the second largest city in Zimbabwe and, as you have probably heard, President Mugabe has economically bled and ruined the country by his excesses and corruption over the years. Politically there is a certain amount of white flight and killing of farmers, largely so the Mugabe cronies can get more land.
It is a beautiful country with resilient and stoic people. We went there because a camp started by the Salvation Army has been doing wonderful work with AIDS orphans for the last five years and I wanted to meet with them.
While the camp was not in session, we visited it about 90 minutes from the city. It was a hot dusty, dry day, one of the last (they hope) before the rainy season comes. We were shown around the camp for an hour or so and then went with a community health worker to visit two families whom they were working with and who lived within 10 miles of the camp.
We stopped at a local general store to bring some food. The store had about a dozen products, mostly canned or candy, on its shelves and we bought a couple of bags of corn meal, cookies, candy, etc. I didn't realize that this would be the only food they would have for that day and for who knows how many to come.
The first place was a nice compound of three one-room circular huts made of mud, but decorated on the outside quite cheerfully. The yard surrounding the buildings was all dirt, but was spotless and swept, as were the buildings.
The head of household was an 18-year old girl, whose parents had both died with the past year and whose two younger siblings were at school, about three kilometers away. We were shown into her kitchen/dining room building and noticed how neat and well-organized it was. A stand held some plates and cups. The fireplace was neat. But there was no fire going or any sign that one had been going, a sign that there had been no food, and there was no food on any of the shelves.
The same applied at the second home, but the more striking thing was the friendly, warm greeting we got before they knew we had anything for them (although one might assume that food was always brought) and the hospitality shown. Although they have no electricity, are over three miles from a source of water, and have no medical care or transportation, they are at ease with life even though there is no social safety net for them when they hit bottom.
The community tries to help its own, but there is nothing growing in the area and the families have been burdened by the reverse flow of family members from the more expensive, more dangerous urban areas back to the farms where they are an added burden if only because they are an additional mouth to feed.
We saw children smiling and playing after school, but almost every one was carrying water in a bucket on his/her head. And we were complaining about being thirsty because we had been out in the sun for a couple of hours!
While the faith-based organizations are probably the best way to scale up and attack the overwhelming problem of HIV/AIDS and children, there was one sour note.
On Sunday morning, at our hotel in Bulawayo, at breakfast I heard some singers and musicians rehearsing. When I asked I was told there was a church service at 9:30 . As we were leaving at 12:00 , I figured I could go and sill have plenty of time to pack.
It was a charismatic Baptist-like service. The music wasn't great but was OK. It had a beat for the most part but then slowed down and got a little too slow. The pastor gave a talk that dwelt on the ways that people who were religiously apart should not work together.
To demonstrate this, he said that a Moslem group had come to him and asked to work with his Church. He declined because Moslems don't accept the basic core of his beliefs and therefore one shouldn't work with them. He then went into his core assumptions that couldn't be broken. I was so upset that I'm not sure I got them all or got them right. I think they were a belief in Jesus as the Messiah; the Bible as the Book of God; and two others that I forget or never got. I walked out as it got to be past 11:00 and I wouldn't get a chance to confront him on his bigotry.
One final event made me feel as though I had already accomplished something. The day before departure home, I was meeting with Michelle and Steven, the Head of HIVSA. I was saying how pleased I was that things were going as well and I was already feeling nostalgic about my eventual separation from the project, as I am committed to moving on to other countries once this camp is stable. Steven said, to Michelle's and my surprise, that HIVSA was now looking beyond South Africa and was planning on extending its services to other countries in the region and that we could continue our partnership into Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia and Botswana. It might be unrelated to the camp project but it felt good.
The whole thing is going so well that it hardly seems like a big challenge or effort. It's not that everything is in place, but I have so much faith in Michelle and HIVSA that I feel like I can take on the role of advisor/consultant and not have to create everything. I love it.
The final piece of good news came on November 7 when a letter arrived from the IRS (after 6 months) notifying us that WorldCamps was approved as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. While never a serious concern, it feels good to have the document in hand.
Organizationally in the field, things look sensational. We have top trainers coming in for our staff training in December. Michael Brandwein, a star in the camp counselor training world, has volunteered his time. Two of the founders of the Irondale Theatre Ensemble, Barbara Mackenzie-Wood and Jim Niesen, have volunteered their time to teach improv skills and AIDS-awareness to counselors and campers.
Our greatest need now is publicity and funding. We have raised just over $20,000 from 82 donors, which is marvelous. Our goal is $175,000.
We have a family foundation that is likely to provide some funding, but we are not in the arms of a solid source of funding. Linda Pulliam and Sara Gideon are doing great work in identifying foundations and other groups to contact, but I have found that personal contacts are best. If you have any in the funding area, please let me know.
Thanks so much for your support. You really are a source of strength. I appreciate your commitment and am inspired by it. As you can see, we still need plenty of financial support and if you would like to include us in your year-end giving, please do! And tell your friends!!
A special acknowledgment to former Winnebago counselor, John Intorcio, who raised almost $2,000 by having his friends sponsor him in the Bay State Marathon with the proceeds all going to World Camps!
Go to our web site for recent photos and reports.
Warm regards,
Phil |
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Camp Sizanani
23°C |
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