Here are some pictures of a great experience Kelly and I got to have last week. A group from World Vision, one of the largest international relief organzitions came to our church. With it came two women from Malawi. Malawi is the country that our church supports through child sponsorship. We have sponsored over 800 kids from a specific town in Malawi and that is why these two women came to visit. Ethel, the one with glasses, works for World Vision. She is quite the impressive lady. She has a masters from a school in Europe and gets to travel with World Vision. However, like everyone in her country, her life has been stricken by Aids. Both her parents are gone, and her sister and brother-in-law died from the virus. Ethel now cares for her niece and nephew. Her job even brought her to a UN conference as a representative from her country. Olipa has a rough story and is here in the U.S. for the first time to share it. Olipa was raped multiple times by the same man. She had two kids as a result of these rapings. When her youngest child was found to be anemic, she wanted to donate blood and was told that she could not because she was carrying the HIV virus as was her daughter (her son fortunately was not infected). HIV patients can be cast aside as it is a disease that people in Malawi don't understand. Some people think the way to get rid of HIV is to have sex with a virgin (probably what happened to Olipa) others think it is a form of warfare from Western society and believe that we put HIV in condoms. Pretty sad, huh. Olipa did challenge her church to educate themselves about HIV and care for those who are infected by it pointing out that Jesus looked out for the sick, not the healthy. She is a pretty brave 24 year old woman.

We had the privelege of hosting these two ladies at our house. I cooked dinner which totally shocked them to see a man working in the kitchen. The next day, Kelly had the chance to take two ladies from an underdeveloped and proverty-stricken nation to Disneyland. She knew she was in for an interesting day when at breakfast they asked where the village was in Southern California and panicked when Kelly merged onto the busiest road (Orange County Freeways) they had ever seen in their lives.

Disneyland was a wonderful day filled with surprised, lots of laughs and a lot of fun. We greatly enjoyed the experience of having 2 Malwian women share a day with us!

All day long they kept asking Kelly: "is this real?" Kelly kept telling them "no". When Olipa (in the blue dress) saw Mickey walking around she asked Kelly if Mickey was "computer generated."


The girls really wanted Kelly to get some pictures of the tram, because they thought it looked like a snake.
All in all, they had quite the experience as did Kelly and her friends. The two girls did everything, and loved every moment. Kelly finished off the day by taking them to the gift shop as the girls racked up a $200 bill in gifts for their kids and family. But in this once in a life opportunity, can anyone say no?

Here are some more pictures of Kelly and her friends with Ethel and Olipa.

Here is a few pictures of the "AIDS TENT" that my mom wanted to get me to take. Mom, unfortunately, it was too dark on the inside. Basically the tent walks you through the lives of 3 different kids. Olipa who stayed with us was one of them. It tells you her story of how she was raped twice and the second time contracted HIV.

This is the outside of the tent.

Here is a sobering statistic. It says "2 children die as a result of AIDS every minute." That means in the time you took to read the blog, probably another 10 kids have died.

Here it says that there 15.2 million orphans in the world. 12 million of them are in Africa. While it says it is due to aids, which is a significant part of it, the genocide and wars are also leaving a bunch of kids orphaned.

After showing you these things, it seems weird and selfish but check back in a few days and maybe you can see some of my Hawaii pictures as that is where I am at right now.