First the good news: ten African countries are only half as poor as they were two decades ago.

Young children in sub-Saharan Africa face an uphill battle for survival against poverty, hunger, and infectious diseases.

Now the bad news: child mortality rates have actually gone up, rather than down, in six sub-Saharan nations. Sub-Saharan Africa holds the unfortunate distinction of being the only region in the world that has seen an increase in the mortality rate of children under age 5. That’s according to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Report Card released on Tuesday.

What makes this report particularly relevant to us at Cross Catholic is that most of our work in Africa is in the sub-Saharan region. Two of the six countries listed in the child-mortality report are Zambia and Kenya, where we are providing food, health care, housing, and education to the poorest of the poor.

Waterborne illnesses and other infectious diseases are leading causes of child deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, while HIV remains a major threat, directly and indirectly, to the health of children. In many cases, lives can be saved by simple improvements in home sanitation and by educating HIV-infected mothers to bottle-feed their infants. Good nutrition plays a vital role in fending off disease, and children must be kept in school because they are the producers of tomorrow’s wealth, which will in turn provide the food, medical care, and healthier way of life their society needs. Cross Catholic is promoting all these developments through partnerships with local Catholic clergy and laypeople who understand Africa’s struggles and know how to make a difference, one family at a time, one village at a time.

Click here for a complete list of all our current Africa projects that you can get involved in today!

In honor of World AIDS Day, Pope Benedict XVI recently gave a talk at St. Peter’s Square:

“The Church never ceases to strive to combat AIDS through her institutions and personnel dedicated to that task. I call upon everyone to make their contribution, with prayer and tangible assistance, so that people affected by the HIV virus may experience the presence of the Lord Who offers comfort and hope. Finally, I trust that, by increasing and coordinating efforts, we may manage to halt and eradicate this disease.”

Cross Catholic provides AIDS education for poor school children in Uganda.

A lot has changed since the first World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, 1988, thanks to the development of antiretroviral drugs and increased awareness of the dangers of promiscuity. But much work remains to be done, especially in Africa, and we at Cross Catholic are humbled to be a part of the ongoing efforts to fight the disease.

Last year, a full 72 percent of new HIV cases worldwide were in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has also been reported that half of all maternal deaths in Botswana and South Africa are due to HIV. Numbers like these tell us that the AIDS threat to the African people is still very real and very serious.

One way we are reaching out to AIDS victims is through the Mbikko Integrated Development project in Uganda, where Catholics are using education to transform a rural community plagued by prostitution, poverty, and disease. Counselors go into classrooms and have one-on-one talks with children to teach them at a young age how to protect themselves from sexual exploitation and to abstain from sex until marriage. They integrate Bible lessons into their teachings to provide a solid moral foundation for promoting a monogamous lifestyle.

In Zambia, we are working with the Franciscans’ Itimpi Community Health Care project to visit AIDS patients and other chronically ill people in their homes and provide medication, food, baby formula (HIV-infected mothers can’t breastfeed), and other care.

As we commemorate this year’s World AIDS Day, you can demonstrate Christ’s love in a powerful way by giving to one of our projects in Africa. Get involved today!

“There are three ways to get AIDS: From your mom, from blood, and from unprotected sex. I got it from my mom,” said 12-year-old Farah, matter-of-factly—over the radio airwaves. Farah is an orphaned resident of The Rainbow House, an orphanage we support for AIDS affected children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An only child, her mother died when she was 4. She is very open about her HIV positive status and was recently interviewed on a Haitian radio station for an awareness campaign.

Twelve-year-old Farah teaches peers about AIDS, helping banish the negative stereotypes in Haiti surrounding the disease.

In addition to providing shelter to 42 AIDS orphans and children who suffer from the disease, The Rainbow House has an innovative outreach program whose goal is to educate the community about AIDS. Their hope is to eliminate the negative stereotypes and unfounded fears that cause people to shun or mistreat children like Farah — the innocent victims of the AIDS pandemic.

The Rainbow House’s myth-busting community awareness program has won recognition by the United Nations as a “Best Practice” model for other organizations to emulate. For nearly a year we’ve been working with The Rainbow House and a few other partners, including Medishare and Espwa Orphanage, to roll out a similar approach on a larger scale throughout Haiti under a $4.8 million, three-year grant awarded to us under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

In the meantime, the gift of life goes on for Farah and the other AIDS-affected orphans at The Rainbow House, where they find acceptance and encouragement, as well as the medicine, nutrition and care they need to live full, healthy lives.

Please remember to keep our Kenyan ministry partners and their communities in your prayers. The situation there is truly dire.

A severe drought is sweeping across the eastern African nation, crippling its agriculture-based economy and leaving entire villages without water. The United Nations World Food Program estimates that nearly four million Kenyans are in urgent need of food right now. The water shortage has also intensified local ethnic conflicts as various tribes compete for bits of land that haven’t yet turned to dust.

Poor Kenyan children depend on the support of our donors for education, medical care, and nutrition

The bottom line: people are dying, and relief just isn’t coming in fast enough.

Rain is not expected to return until October. But when the rain comes, it will hit hard, and the Kenyans will have a new problem to worry about – floods – thanks to a forecasted El Nino weather pattern.

Cross Catholic has several ongoing projects in Kenya. One of our commitments is to cover education costs for poor children to attend Catholic schools, such as St. Joseph Freinademetz Primary School in Ruai, about 30 miles from the center of Nairobi. We also provide care for chronically ill patients suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, through the Riara Health Project.

The priests, nuns, and other dedicated workers involved in these important outreaches need our prayers to help them through this difficult time. We believe God can take evil circumstances, no matter how bad, and use them for his good purposes. May this crisis become opportunity for the poor to receive Christ’s love!

Check out this video interview with Fikansa Chanda, the program manager of the Itimpi Community Health Care program in Zambia. He is so thankful for the Cross Catholic donors who are helping to provide food, medicine, and health care for HIV/AIDS patients and other victims of chronic illness.

More video footage from Zambia to come later this week!

One thing we’ve learned from doing AIDS relief in developing nations is that you can’t just build a clinic or send medicine and then wait for the problem to go away. Medical treatment is vital, but it’s not the whole solution. There are deeply-ingrained attitudes and perspectives that need to change – attitudes toward AIDS victims, their families, and even chronically ill people in general.

Mike Henry, a Cross Catholic project officer, recently returned from Haiti, where he met with our ministry partners to talk about how they can better serve the needs of HIV/AIDS victims. One of those ministries is Rainbow House, a shelter for children infected with HIV or orphaned by AIDS. We are helping them relocate to a new, larger facility on an eight-acre tract of land.

Rainbow House in Haiti provides shelter and care for HIV/AIDS infected and affected children

Mike described to us the stigma that AIDS carries in Haitian culture. The disease is often blamed on black magic, and those who catch it are looked down upon and isolated from society, to suffer and die alone. Ignorance about the disease leads to fears that you can catch it by breathing the same air or touching the belongings of someone who has it, or by being bitten by a mosquito. AIDS orphans are abandoned in hospitals or left to fend for themselves on the streets.

The stigma brings other complications, too. AIDS patients trying to keep their problem secret don’t want health workers visiting their home. At-risk men, women, and children should be made to feel as comfortable as possible with getting tested and seeking help, but this can’t happen without a change of attitude in their neighbors. That’s why we stress the importance of education.

At Rainbow House, this is done through peer-to-peer workshops and youth events that dispel myths about AIDS, so that communities will learn to accept infected children with love and compassion. Similarly, our Riara Health Project in Kenya invites patients to one-on-one and group teaching sessions on health and nutrition; and our Itimpi Home-Based Care project in Zambia organizes community support groups to curb risky behaviors that lead to the spread of the disease.

The Cross Catholic approach to the AIDS crisis is more than damage control. We aim to change hearts and minds, to bring about a better, healthier future.

Every few months we receive updates on the projects we support from our partners in the field. The following is an uplifting success story we recently received from a project in Zambia:

Agness Nayame, the youngest of six, was born with a congenital deformity on her left leg. The 12-year-old’s father passed away when she was just a small child, leaving her mother alone to care for the family.

Agness and her family endured much ridicule from their village community because of her deformity, which kept her from walking normally. As in most African countries, the people in the Mpulungu district of northern Zambia subscribe to the traditional but false belief that children born with deformities are cursed and their illness is caused by some fault of the family. When Agness was born, gossip of her deformity began to circulate. People from the community came by their home, not to offer congratulations to the family, but to personally confirm the “bad” that had befallen the community because of the Nayame family.

Agness, 12, was born with a genetic deformity on her left leg. She endured mean-spirited teasing and ridicule from her community because of it. She eventually lost her leg after a complicated surgery and had to use crutches to get around.

Despite the gossip, the family stayed strong with encouragement from each other and some church members. But the pressure mounted as Agness grew. Her mother knew she could no longer keep her safe at home, away from the mean-spirited teasing of others in the community over her condition. Agness did, indeed, experience a lot of teasing and embarrassment as she tried to make friends and attend school. Her self-esteem was crushed.

But just when it seemed nothing could lift her from the depths of despair, Agness received some help that changed her life. A local school for disabled children saw her need and referred her to the Kabulonga Cheshire Home, a holistic rehabilitation program for poor children with disabilities supported by Cross International Catholic Outreach. Through the program Agness received food, specialized education, and physical therapy.

Through the help of the Kabulonga Cheshire Home and Cross International Catholic Outreach, Agness received a prosthetic limb.

After Agness lost her leg during a complicated operation, the Cheshire Home, with the help of Cross Catholic, helped her get a prosthetic limb. The rehabilitative care she’s received over the last year and a half has also greatly improved her mobility and performance in school. The staff has taken great pleasure in seeing this young girl able to walk independently and continue her education without problems.

Agness is very grateful for all the help, and she’s got her smile back. With her new artificial limb, she has the confidence to socialize with other children without the fear of being laughed at. Her self-esteem is growing and she is developing into a happy young lady. Thanks to aid provided by Cross Catholic and its generous benefactors, Agness can now face the world with confidence. She is no longer a victim of discrimination or disgrace!

Click here to read more about the work Cross Catholic is doing with this life-changing project.

One of the most-quoted parts of scripture is the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. Here we are given a picture of what Christ means when he commands us to “love our neighbor” (Luke 10:27).

This story is especially relevant for charities like ours who grapple with the logistics and practicality of meeting the poor’s many needs around the world. We often touch on this topic during our daily staff devotional time. One question that we come back to again and again is this: What does it mean to truly “love one another” (1 John 4:11), and how do we put it into practice?

Just a few days ago, we were reminded of what “loving one another” really looks when we heard this story from one of the ministries we support in Zambia, the Itimpi home-based healthcare program:

There are hundreds of AIDS orphans like Ingrid who need care. Through the Itimpi home-based healthcare program we are able to help dozens of AIDS orphans like these.

As Carol lay on her deathbed, she had one desire; she wanted to see her beautiful 9-year-old daughter, Ingrid, cared for and educated. Carol soon became another AIDS victim (she had contracted the disease from her husband, who died shortly before her), and Ingrid became another innocent AIDS orphan. Her grandparents, John and Anna, took the child in, but the resources in their overcrowded home were already stretched paper thin. Two of John and Anna’s grown daughters had moved back in after their husbands died, and they were already caring for several of their other orphaned grandchildren. Ingrid’s move to the care of John and Anna was the final blow that brought John to his knees. He came to our mission, his eyes welled up with tears, and told us that he was not able to feed and clothe all the children and his widowed daughters without asking for help. Now with just one more child, much as they loved her, it had become impossible. Thankfully, we were able to reach out to John and his family, our neighbors in Christ. With the support of Cross International, we now give them a monthly stipend in Ingrid’s name to help provide food and necessities for the whole family.

Sub-Saharan Africa is more heavily affected by HIV and AIDS than any other region of the world. The reality of this statement hit our Africa project officer, Jim Kline, during his recent trip to visit the projects we support there. He described it this way: “The extent of the AIDS pandemic in Africa is kind of like the genocide in Rwanda. Everyone you talk to has been affected by it in some way. Even if they themselves aren’t affected, they have a neighbor, or relative, or friend who is.”

With AIDS claiming the lives of an estimated 1.5 million people in the region, more than 11 million AIDS orphans have been left to fend for themselves.

We support several programs in Africa to help AIDS orphans, providing everything from housing and food to Christian counseling. Below is a hopeful story brought back from Jim’s recent trip that illustrates the impact one of these programs is having on the lives of AIDS orphans:

(Left to right) Saquina, 17, Anicha, 9, Miro, 5, Rosa, 13, Guinalia, 15, and Iranio, 18, (not pictured) were left alone and utterly destitute when their mother died of AIDS two years ago. Here they are just weeks after their mother’s death sitting in front of the crumbling shack where they used to live.

The six Borjes children have known much pain and hardship. In 2001, their father was murdered in front of their home by a drunken soldier, leaving their mother to support the family alone. They were already quite poor, but without their father their life got much harder. Then their mother became ill. She frequently went to a witchdoctor for a cure, but she only got worse and eventually died of AIDS in September 2007.

Left to care for themselves, the siblings, ages 5 to 18 at the time, struggled to survive without an income. One of the older girls turned to prostitution to make a little money for food. Soon after that our mission partner, Reencontro, a Catholic ministry that helps AIDS orphans in Maputo, Mozambique, began giving them food, which helped — but the family desperately needed a new place to live. The leaky, crumbling cement shell of a structure they lived in was on the verge of collapsing.

The Borjes children, now ages 7 to 20, stand in front of their new home built through the gifts of our benevolent Catholic donors.

In 2008, the Borjes children finally received some good news. They were being moved into a home built with funds from our generous donors. Working through Reencontro’s orphan aid program, we have been able to continue to support these children. They now receive a $200 stipend each month for food and living necessities. Three caregivers from the community, hired by Reencontro, visit the children frequently to make sure they are doing okay. For the first time in a long time, the Borjes children have hope.

Click here to learn more about the work we do with Reencontro and AIDS orphans in Mozambique.

One of our project officers, Jim Kline, recently returned from a several-week trip to Africa to visit some of the projects we support. In Mozambique, he spent some time at the Reencontro orphan project, which provides care to about 7,000 orphans and vulnerable children in Maputo. That’s where he met Zeinabo, a 15-year-old double AIDS orphan who overcame some pretty difficult circumstances and started her own successful sewing business with the help of Reencontro.

Zeinabo, a 15-year-old double AIDS orphan, started her own sewing business with training and equipment she received from Reencontro, a ministry we support in Maputo, Mozambique.

Zeinabo, who moved in with her aunt after her parents died, split her day between a vocational tailoring program at Reencontro and her many chores at home. Her aunt became angry that she was spending so much time at the training program — time she could have spend doing chores. One day in a rage, she poured hot water on Zeinabo’s feet, thinking it would prevent her from making the long walk to Reencontro. But what was intended for evil, God turned to good!

Social workers from Reencontro came and spoke to Zeinabo’s aunt, and convinced her to let her niece finish the tailoring program. They also gave Zeinabo a sewing machine so she could start a business once she graduated. Now in 10^th grade, Zeinabo is able to make a comfortable living from her sewing business and still attend school.

“What is really neat about this story is that Zeinabo’s feet [which her aunt tried to hurt to keep her from going to the vocational training] now power her manual sewing machine and in essence her career,” Jim said. “That’s definitely a God thing.”

Zeinabo uses her feet to power her manual sewing machine and, in essence, her business.