Camp Kindle will be on DIRECTV Hometown Heroes second season beginning Sunday, April 5, (9 a.m. ET/PT) only on DIRECTV’s The 101(R) Network.
Read the Press Release! Copy and past the link below!
http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/Second+Season+of+DIRECTV+(R)+
Hometown+Heroes+Gives+Viewers+Perfect+Antidote+for+Bad+News+Fatigue+
by+Focusing+on+Inspiring+Individuals+Making+a+Difference/4499379.html
February 7 is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
President Barack Obama has made reducing HIV/AIDS infection, particularly among black Americans, a priority of his administration. The President addressed this challenge with this statement on HIV in the black community one year ago: “In 2005, 64 percent of women living with HIV/AIDS in America were black. It is not enough for us to call this an outrage, or even to provide more access to education, health care, and economic development. We have to overcome the stigma that surrounds HIV/AIDS in the African-American community… We need to talk about HIV/AIDS in our homes, in our schools, and in our churches. We need to encourage folks to get tested… In short, we have to take this on clearly and directly.”
AIDS is now the leading cause of death for Black women ages 25 to 34.
AIDS is the second leading cause of death for Black men ages 35 to 44.
President Barack Obama has made reducing HIV/AIDS infection, particularly among black Americans, a priority of his administration. The President addressed this challenge with this statement on HIV in the black community one year ago: “In 2005, 64 percent of women living with HIV/AIDS in America were black. It is not enough for us to call this an outrage, or even to provide more access to education, health care, and economic development. We have to overcome the stigma that surrounds HIV/AIDS in the African-American community… We need to talk about HIV/AIDS in our homes, in our schools, and in our churches. We need to encourage folks to get tested… In short, we have to take this on clearly and directly.”
AIDS is now the leading cause of death for Black women ages 25 to 34.
AIDS is the second leading cause of death for Black men ages 35 to 44.
h/t: Until There’s a Cure
Hello all,
So much has happened since my last email and it is crazy to think that my time here in Tanzania is wrapping up! I really am going to miss this country, the people, my new OHS family, the children, the Tanzanian OHS staff, and this way of life! The slogan “No Hurry in Africa” really speaks volumes about how things work here and I don’t feel ready to return to the hectic, fast-paced lifestyle of So Cal quite yet. I will definitely need some time to adjust, but am craving good food…salad, fresh vegetables, salmon, Golden Spoon, 21 Choices, soymilk,…and of course cannot wait to be reunited with all of you!!! YAY!! Yet, the pineapple and mangos here are out of this world and I will miss being able to buy a slice of pineapple for 10 cents on the street.
Last weekend I went on an exciting adventure with 5 friends to Uganda to go white water rafting down the Nile! This was one of the most amazing experiences!!!! It took a 22 hour bus ride to get there, but so worth it and Uganda is such a beautiful, lush country! In total, we rafted for 5 hours and went down 9 class 3, 4, and 5 rapids over the stretch of 18 miles!! It was so surreal that I was rafting and floating down the Nile and the surrounding jungle is goregous! In the smooth parts of the water, we got to jump out of the raft, swim, and float down the Nile and it was so exhilerating! Our raft did get flipped over at one point, but that just added to the adventure and the intensity of the trip. Two of my friends went bungee jumping over the Nile, but I saved that adventure for another time! Our group did buy the DVD and CD of photos so I really look forward to sharing my adventure with you all!
We finally got the orphanage complete, staffed, and prepared to begin taking in children. Our first arrivals are twin brothers, Barracka and Tumsifu, age 3. They are so so precious, always smiling and happy, and soaking in all the hugs and love that they can get!! They are small for their age due to malnourishment, but they have a bright future ahead of them and we are taking great care of them. Tomorrow we are also getting 2 more children ages 5 and 9 and it is great to have kids onsite!
We also got to have our last testing day in Kisongo Market and it was great to get more information out about HIV/AIDS and provide free testing to the villagers! It was a success and it was great to see their initial fears calmed and their excitement about the new knowledge they gained. Additionally we had our farewell dinner and invited all the villagers and their children to have dinner with us, dance to the tunes they DJ provided, and celebrate the opening of OHS.
Overall, our group is getting ready to go home. We are all experiencing homesickness, weariness, exhaustion, and the sense of completion because we have done what we set out to do. We all desire to come back in the next few years and visit OHS, see how far it has come along, and visit the dear friends that we have made here!
I am thrilled because my beloved Billy Jack is arriving tomorrow and then our adventures begin!!! YAY! We will climb Mount Kilimanjaro, spend Christmas in Zanzibar (one of the most beautiful islands with white beaches and turquoise water), and then spend a few days in London and Paris! I cannot wait for these adventures and I am so excited to spend time with him after 3 long months!
I hope that you are all doing well and that you are enjoying the holiday season! I cannot comprehend that it is almost Christmas due to the lack of commercialism of the holidays here! Plus, it is getting more hot as we are moving into the warm season here. I pray that you enjoy this time of year and are doing well! I arrive home on Dec. 31, just in time to spend the New Year’s in the US! I’ll try to email again before I am home and I cannot wait to see your faces, be in your presence, and catch up on life! Your emails have been so encouraging and wonderful, and it always brightens my day to here from you!!
Much love and I’ll be home before too long,
Alissa
I was interviewed at the LA AIDS Walk in October 2008. (They sped up the video, I’m not normally so chirpy and erratic 
Be sure to check out causecast.org (the site that did the interview). They have an awesome site where you can learn more and get involved with many different causes.
-A.J.
Hello to all,
Wow! Time has flown by since the last mass email I sent out and now I only have 2.5 weeks of the program before my own traveling begins!! I hope that you are well and that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with loved ones and friends! This trip has pointed out to me even more how very much I have to be thankful for, including the presence of all of you in my life!
The 2-day safari was so beautiful, enchanting, magnificent, and impressive!! I saw lions, hippos, elephants, zebras, baboons, antelope, giraffes, ostriches, cheetahs, hyenas, one lone rhino, wildebeests, flamingos, warthogs, dik diks, many different bird species, and more. Our safari guide led us through Lake Meynara and Ngorongoro Crater and it was so thrilling to stand up through the roof of the jeep as he winded down the roads and we were spectators observing all of the animals in their natural habitats. The zoo will never be the same for me because there is just something so unique and majestic in seeing these creatures in hundreds of kilometers of free space! The Ngorongoro Crater is famed as the 8th wonder of the world and I would have to agree! It is spectacular and I literally felt that I was in “The Lion King” because you are surrounded by the steep cliffs, and once you are inside the crater, there are clumps of beautiful trees, lakes filled with hippos and flamingos, plains, tons of vegetation, and it is just goregous with the many patches of lights and shadows! I didn’t want to leave the crater and have made a commitment to come back and experience it again!
Construction in Africa has been slow, but finally we have the windows, doors, and paint inside of the orphanage. We also are recruiting a social worker, nurse, and Mama to help run the orphanage. I am on the landscaping team and we got to pick out different plants and trees for the orphanage and it is going to look beautiful once they are all planted. I have a new-found respect for gardners and construction workers because we have also finished building the cow pen, have been shoveling a ton of dirt, and planting banana, orange and mango trees. And it is really hard work. The furniture is almost complete so this week we are going to go shopping for the toys of the orphanage as well. We are still doing more research on which kids are coming to live at the orphanage, but I am glad that I will get to see completion before I leave.
We finished teaching the primary schools and on Thanksgiving we went to spend some time with them! It was amazing because they invited us to play with them in their dancing games, they created a skit about HIV and the stigma associated with it, put on a talent show for us, and sang us a thank you song! I had to take a step back and be so appreciative because although I really missed my family and wished I was home with them on Thanksgiving, I was so thankful that I got to share in this experience with our students and be a part of their culture and way of life! A lot of us went to an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner, had a feast, celebrated being together, and all went around and said what we were thankful for. We invited some friends we had just met an hour before to share Thanksgiving with us, and it was a great celebration!
Last Saturday we got to do a community teaching at A to Zed, a factory that produces mass amounts of mosquito nets. President Bush actually visited this factory when he came to Tanzania a few years ago and gave all of the villagers in Mateves, the village that I am staying in, free mosquito nets. Unfortunately, they all sold the mosquito nets because they needed the money for food. This factory is huge and employs 1000 workers. The factory runs 24/7 365 days a year and the shifts are 12 hours straight. When we walked inside the gates, I felt like I was walking into the Industrial Revolution. The living quarters are so crammed and dirty, and there are so many workers. We taught in the warehouse where they get their food and over 100 workers crowded around us in a circle and stood as we all taught different parts of the HIv/AIDS curriculum for over an hour. We stayed to answer questions and then promised that we would be back to have free HIV testing. We went back yesterday to provide more teaching, answers to questions, and testing. We performed over 250 free HIV tests and it was amazing that the workers wanted to get tested and have now learned how to prevent becoming infected from HIV. A lot of them were also so excited that we were passing out free condoms and there were funny moments when the only words they spoke to us in English were, “Give my my condoms”. It was also amusing that many of the men are convinced that if they marry an American woman, they will be rich for the rest of their lives and she will work and always provide for him. So all of the girls got many marriage proposals and we gracioulsy tried to declline their proposals and instead ask if we could answer any question they have about HIV. Overall, it was such a rewarding experience and it was so encouraging to see them so receptive to the information and going door to door telling their friends that they should get tested. We are going to go back during a week day so the people who work on the weekend can also have the opportunity to get tested.
The days here are long, but the week goes by very quickly. We have continued to experience rain and deal with our site being really muddy, our trucks getting stuck in the mud, and even trudging in the mud for over an hour yesterday to get to A to Zed. But the landscape is beautiful because the grass is growing and everything is green. There is a general consensus that we have loved our experience, but are getting ready to come home and be reunited with everyone! I am in the same boat! I still have a few things that I would like to experience here, but am getting so excited to see all of you and catch up! Please email me if you have time because I love hearing news from home and life updates! I will try to send out a few more emails until Dec. 31 when I can talk to you in person! Take care and can’t wait to see you soon!!
All my love,
Alissa
Eva, Julian (one of our CK West campers) and I went to 48 Hours to Action at UCLA on December 1st to support World AIDS Day. We spoke about Project Kindle and what we are doing to fight the AIDS pandemic and Julian told his story about how HIV/AIDS impacts his life. Julian also learned one of the UCLA Dance Marathon Morale dances and then helped teach it to the audience. Here are some pictures from the event!
-Nichol
The crowd, doing the signature “blender” move!
Julian teaching the crowd the dance!
Julain with the E-Team (Christina, Danny, Randi, not pictured Taylor)
Here’s the deal. Early Dancer Registration closes at UCLA for DM 2009 on Friday (12/5/08). If you register by then you can save $10! Watch this video. Then go register to dance. Project Kindle is one of the beneficiaries of UCLA’s Dance Marathon. If you LOVE Project Kindle, then you with also LOVE DM. You do not have to be a UCLA student to dance.
Join the Project/Camp Kindle team, ck + dm = HOPE.
Greetings to my loved ones 11,000 miles away!!
So much has happened since the last email and I am so glad that I finally get to email out again! Hope you are all doing well and it has been so great to hear back from a lot of you so thank you so much for the updates and kind words! I will be home in a little less than 7 weeks which is crazy!!
Good news is that we have gotten apartments for the older street kids so now 8 of them are off the streets! We have provided them with beds,blankets, stoves, and have helped to find them jobs so we are so excited with the progress we are making for the older kids! There does continue to be struggles of how to best help some of the street kids who are too old to go back to school, and there continues to be some attitude problems and gaps in our understanding of what is the best things for these kids, but we continue to strive to find new solutions for them. We have taken half of them to be tested for HIV and I am thrilled to report that they have all been negative thus far. We finished teaching the street kids the HIV curriculum and I am so glad that they now have that knowledge to protect themselves fro
We had our first rain storm and it poured rain for 24 hours! Our site was a mess and so much fun all at the same time because there were mud puddles everywhere! Both of our Land Rovers got stuck in the mud so it took 2 hours for half of us to help push them out of the rain. But we all had smiles on our faces and laughed because there were definitely mud fights and dancing in the rain so overall it was an amazing experience! Since all of the roads to our site are dirt roads I am sure that we will encounter many more mud adventures, but it just adds to the stories here and what we work together to overcome!
Unfortunately, I did get malaria, but the great news is that I caught it early and took the strongest medication! I am happy to report that this morning I woke up and it is the first time in over a week that I feel energized again that the parasite is completely out of my body! It is such an odd disease because one moment you will feel fine and the next you are weak, tired, dizzy, lightheaded, and feverish. About half of us have gotten malaria, but over here it just happens and is not as big of a deal as in the US. Don’t worry though because I am healthy and rejuvenated again!
I forgot to talk about how incredible it was to watch Obama’s acceptance speech over here!! We woke up at 4AM and watched CNN from a hotel! Everyone in Africa is nuts over Obama and we were all so excited; we made Obama headbands and wore them all day! We were all so moved by Obama’s acceptance speech and I got this hugs twinge of homesickness during his speech! However,it is incredible that I was in Tanzania when history was made with Obama being elected president! The rest of the day when Tanzanians would see us they would yell Obama and cheer! It was such a great day to be a mzungu (a white person from America)!
We also got to visit one of the only remaining leprosy centers in Tanzania and I was so blessed by this experience. Leprosy causes the fingers and toes to fall off as well as blindness in one or both eyes. It was such a great gift that our group did not believe in the stigma and were not afraid to touch them and chat with them. They had so much joy in their eyes and their smiles radiated with light when we talked with them! Nuns run this center and they told us some amazing stories! It is so tragic that family members still will abandon their loved ones if they get leprosy, despite the fact that this disease is not contagious if they receive one year of treatment. The lepers make some amazing crafts that they sell for an income for themselves and they are so beautiful. This visit has been one of the most memorable things I have done here. There are only two leprosy centers in Tanzania and I think this disease still only exists in 10 countries in Africa.
On Satuday I am going on a safari to Ngorongoro Crater and I can’t wait to email you all about the animals that I will get to experience in their natural domain!
It is crazy that my program ends in only 4.5 weeks! I miss you all and will try to email again soon because I don’t have that much more time here! You are all in my thoughts and prayers and I love you so much! Hope things are going well at home and I will be back so soon!
All my love,
Alissa
Mambo vipi!!
I hope all is well and I am sure that there is so much excitement about the coming election! Obama pins and stickers are everywhere here and we will all be watching the election on Tuesday!
I forgot to let you know that I do have a cell phone here. Via skype you can send text messages for really cheap. However, since I lost my phone right before I left I have no one’s phone number. If you need to reach me my number is 2550785347501. My email access is getting a little better so I will try to send out another update very soon!
On Saturday we had a great teaching session with the students and were able to clear up misconceptions about women being the cause of HIV and that HIV is a punishment from God because there is no cure. We are going to have a free testing day later this month and I am so so excited for that day!
I miss you very much and on Tuesday is the half way point of me being gone! Can’t believe it has only been, yet at the same time has already been 6 weeks!
All my love and I will email soon,
Alissa
