Breaking the chains of Poverty

from The Cincinnati Enquirer

Nearly four years ago, six Cincinnati Country Day eighth-grade girls decided to raise money to buy shoes for children in a poverty-stricken South African village devastated by AIDS.

They sold T-shirts in their school cafeteria for $15 apiece and raised $2,000.

That success encouraged them to expand their project - which they named Helping Other People Endure (H.O.P.E.) - to raise money to feed the many orphans in the little Zulu village, Langkloof.

They sold more T-shirts with H.O.P.E. emblazoned across the front. They held bake sales. They washed cars. They solicited individual donations. They held a fashion show featuring students from Cincinnati Country Day in Indian Hill and four other high schools.

Today, those six girls and two other classmates who later joined the project have raised nearly $500,000.

"When people saw the kind of effort we were putting into it, the money started pouring in," said one of the students, Maya Amoils, a resident of Madeira whose parents, Steve and Sandi, are natives of South Africa. "The way everything happened is kind of a miracle."

The project has made a profound impact for the people of Langkloof, where the 3,000 black residents live in one-room houses made out of dried mud, thatched roofs and dirt floors.

H.O.P.E. has provided daily meals for 350 children, clothing, a renovated preschool, a new playground, fruit trees and vegetable gardens, a storehouse for vegetables, a water supply for the school and the village and a restored kindergarten.

Maya and her family have been to Langkloof several times in recent years while paying visits to their family members who live near the village.

Almost all of the girls who are involved in the project and some of their parents have accompanied the Amoilses on trips to Langkloof. They stayed in a hotel near Langkloof operated by Sandi Amoils' sister, Carol Anne Mumby, and her husband, Chris.

The visits hardened the girls' resolve to help the village. Once the village children overcame their shyness, they flocked to the girls. Three or four of the smaller children at a time would climb onto the girls' laps and hug them.

"When you see the faces of these kids, you'd give the world to them if you could," said Jordan Baird, a friend of Maya's who went to South Africa last summer.

Many of the children have lost one or both parents to the AIDS virus.

"Because a lot of the kids don't have parents, they just love for us to hold them and touch them," said Sandi Amoils. "When Maya came back from South Africa after going to Langkloof for the first time, she just wanted her friends to be able to feel the same way about the kids that she did."

Maya, Jordan and the other girls in the project - Megan Levine, Ellyn Guttman, Rachel Nussbaum, Christie Lindner, Carly Brightwell and Amanda Cohen - are juniors at Cincinnati Country Day.

Their lives of affluence are far removed from the abject poverty of Langkloof. The village's toilets are holes in the ground. There is no running water and minimal electricity.

Megan became so attached to the children of Langkloof during her visit last summer that she sobbed as the car taking her to the airport to fly back home pulled out of the village.

The nonprofit Health Foundation Fund in Cincinnati manages the donations to H.O.P.E. At no charge, the Mumbys administer the projects funded by H.O.P.E. All the money is used for programs to help Langkloof.

"The more funds we receive, the more we can do - not only for the children, but for the whole village," Carole Ann Mumby said.

The Mumbys want to help Langkloof residents become as self-sufficient as possible. They plan to establish a farm that will employ villagers.

This year, funds from H.O.P.E. will pay for the construction of a new building that will house a kitchen, a dining room for the children and a storage room. The food for the children now is cooked at the Mumbys' hotel and is brought to Langkloof, where the children eat it outdoors. Once this building is constructed, the food will be cooked there and the children will be able to eat indoors.

As physicians, Steve and Sandi Amoils have noticed how much the daily meals have improved the children's health over the past two years.

Before the food program started, many children were afflicted with chronic coughs, and their hair fell out from malnutrition. That's no longer the case.

"The nutritional change in these kids is incredible," Sandi Amoils said. "They'll be much more resistant to illnesses now."

Maya and her friends say they plan to continue raising funds to help Langkloof during their college years and beyond.

"This project isn't something I started just to put on my college applications," Maya said. "This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life."