[World Relief] First Lady Meets with an AIDS Orphan

From World Relief

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 took her father. The AIDS epidemic took her mother. Her older brother sold the family home and abandoned his four younger siblings. Twelve-year-old Tatu Mukeshimana now finds herself heading a household of children. Her story is becoming increasingly common in a country where the number of AIDS orphans is surging.

First Lady Laura Bush, on a three country tour of Africa, visited privately with Tatu, asking her questions and offering encouragement. Tatu benefits from the funding that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief provides to World Relief and the Mobilizing for Life program.

“When my relatives kicked me out, the church brought me in,” Tatu said.

“Not long ago many church leaders across Africa thought AIDS was a curse. Today we are witnesses to dramatic change. Today we see faith in action.” Debbie Dortzbach said to those gathered for the day's activities, “we have a charge to bring transformation to lives limited by a virus but revived by antiretrovirals, shattered by condemning attitudes of some but loved by simple touch and presence of many.”

When Mrs. Bush and her daughter Jenna arrived, a group of teenagers presented a skit used in clubs and school programs showing children learn to embrace a classmate with AIDS. Erasing the stigma associated with the disease and encouraging care by friends and family is a primary goal of the Mobilizing for Life program.

During her visit, the First Lady learned how World Relief empowers and equips churches and their communities to provide compassionate care, orphan support and AIDS education in the face of the AIDS pandemic.

She met local women empowered by World Relief’s Urwego microenterprise program and heard how World Relief’s Mobilizing for Life program enables churches and schools to teach youth about AIDS, fight harmful stigmas, and promote abstinence and marital fidelity.

Debbie Dortzbach, World Relief’s International Director for HIV/AIDS programs referred to one of President Bush’s favorite hymns, “A Charge I Have to Keep,” as a rallying cry.

“[The church] is the place of hope—the place for new beginnings. The place where we make promises as we do at weddings or baptisms and where we confess breaking those promises and seek forgiveness in meditation and prayer. This is the place where behavior changes. Not because we are here--but because God is here. We have a charge to keep.”

World Relief strives to keep that charge, working for, with and from local churches in Rwanda to provide hope to the poor and suffering, to empower those living with HIV/AIDS, and to embody Christ in the midst of pain.