Presbyterians have responded by raising $92,000 for the Towards A World Without AIDS campaign. Already $80,000 has been allocated to support new work of our overseas church partners struggling to respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in their countries.
About 70 per cent of all admissions to Ekwendeni Hospital, in Malawi, are HIV-positive. Ekwendeni Hospital established an AIDS program working in orphan care, home-based care, counselling, education, and prevention programs in 1988. $40,000 is going to help the Ekwendeni Hospital AIDS program expand its voluntary counselling and testing, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission activities. Malawi has one of the highest HIV infection rates in Africa, and the world.
A lot of this money has been raised through the efforts of congregations like these:
Our Christmas Eve service this year was Christmas Around the World. One of our ‘stops' is Malawi, where I gave the congregation a bit of the information PWS&D sent along. We sang the Christmas song from Malawi that's in our Book of Praise (#155). Some of our folks responded financially with the use of the envelopes that went in the bulletins.
I hope it all serves to raise the awareness of our congregation to the church's mission in the wider world.
Nancy Carle
Our congregation holds a community dinner twice a year to raise funds for the church. Usually the funds go to help our own expenses, as we are a small, rural, aid-receiving congregation. This fall however we were within our own budget, and the congregation decided this would be a good opportunity to support the national Towards A World Without AIDS campaign. An ad was put in the local weekly newspaper inviting folks to come and share in this project. About 95 people participated in the evening, which also included a silent auction. I gave a brief outline of the goals of the campaign, and what the national church is doing to help those around the world, but particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, suffering from this pandemic. Our community and church raised $1,420 that evening to give to the campaign. My most exciting moment came when a woman, who does not attend church, came up to me and quite excitedly said, "Wow! I didn't know the Presbyterian Church did stuff like this!"
Shirley Cochrane
