Youth Challenge International Fund

"You need no more than empirical evidence, your own eyesight, your own common sense to understand what is happening.  When one travels through those rural villages and hinterlands, as I have done for the last two years, the human toll is desolating.  The immune system of huge numbers of women are week.  Seven million agricultural workers have died of AIDS since 1985; the household assests have been exausted by attending to parental illness; children have  been pulled out of school to care for sick dying parents, losing the one meal a day that might have been available from a school feeding program; malnutrition is everywhere evident; fields are left untended; crops aren't grown; food isn't taken to market, & if it is, no one has money to pay for it.  What we're talking about is the way in which this virus, the cause of the most appalling communicable disease in human history, attacks every sector, making the interplay of health and agriculture one more shortcut to carnage."