I am an architect, urban designer, world traveler, safe water specialist, solar cooker demonstrator, English as a second language teacher, AIDS orphan supporter, photographer, magician, father, poet, hiker, friend, builder, sculptor and working to get the U.S. government to work to solve world problems through the United Nations.

I am working to get more and more people and groups in the United States to meet all my friends in Zambia who are working to support the education of AIDS orphans.

People like you who are members of small, long-term communities (schools, communities of faith, businesses, institutions, neighborhoods) who would benefit from supporting the education of children who have lost parents to the AIDS epidemic in Zambia and their caretakers. These children are so bright and wonderful. bout 600 students to go to school. But there are hundreds more who need you to connect with them.

We organize trips each summer of service volunteers. We each pay our own way (about $3,400 for the summer of 08 covers airfare, meals, lodging, and
ground transportation). Or we raise the money in our community to travel to Zambia to teach, learn, build, make friends and bring back our stories to tell our communities. That is how they learn first hand how the resources we take with us are used.

Last summer 18 of us (high school students, college students and others) took donations from our communities of 150 pairs of sneakers, books, clothes, sports equipment and teaching materials in our second suit cases.

There are so many lessons and satisfactions for me from this experience. This former 'quarry child' has proven to be such a resilient child. After all that hard labor and dangerous work and isolation, the human spirit has triumphed! He has become physically healthy. He is learning well. The other children enjoy his presence. Most importantly he now has opportunity, and we have made that possible. Africa has lost a generation of its most productive citizens to the AIDS epidemic. One child at a time each of us can help Africa recover by supporting the education of children like him.

Dr. Richard Bail, of Communities Without Borders, talking about one child (of hundreds) who we have supported to have food, shoes, clothes and an education.

I have traveled and worked in Scandinavia, most European countries, Egypt, Russia, Siberia, Estonia, Latvia, Mongolia, China and Kyrgyzstan. But my most rewarding experience recently was in Zambia where I was working to test the safety of the water in the extreme poverty areas around the capital so we can work to purify it, helping villagers build a medical clinic, demonstrating solar cooking to save precious funds that people spend on charcoal in Zambia, teaching English to kids from age five to age 13 with a team, finding bed nets and distributing them to families to protect them from malaria-carrying mosquitoes, distributing shoes for the children and organizing comprehensive efforts to expand this work to more of the children who need them and empowering their communities to find ways of increasing their incomes so they can be self-sufficient.

People - meeting and learning from them. Hearing their stories.

English, some French - spattering of Russian, Spanish and Nyangia. Smiles, laughs and music. Dancing, playing and cooking.