HIV/AIDS

AIDS Caregiver Kits Assembly

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:59:03 +0000

December 29, 2012

AIDS Caregiver Kits Assembly

For Immediate Release

(St. Louis, MO)—Volunteer Caregivers who care for thousands living with HIV and AIDS in Swaziland and other African countries will receive Caregiver Kits assembled by 16,000 attendees at Urbana 12. Urbana 12 is ��Ƶ Christian Fellowship’s triennial Student Missions Conference, held at the Edward Jones Dome, December 27-31, 2012.

The kits include medical and hygiene items for the compassionate care of people living with HIV and AIDS in a part of the world that has borne the brunt of what has been called the largest humanitarian crisis of all time, and where access to basic health care is greatly limited. “The Caregiver Kits provide practical materials which bring dignity and comfort to those living with AIDS,” said Steve Haas, Vice President of World Vision, which is partnering with ��Ƶ on the project.

Over the past year World Vision saw 25,000 Caregiver kits assembled. During this one Saturday night at Urbana 12, another 32,000 kits were added to that total. Each Urbana attendee packed two kits and enclosed notes of encouragement and blessing for the kit recipient.

Items in the Caregiver Kits include antibacterial soap, antifungal cream, petroleum jelly, gauze pads, washcloths, and water purification sachets. The wholesale cost for the supplies in each kit totals over $20. After moving through the assembly line, each attendee took their assembled kits to a shipping container in the arena in which it is being shipped to Africa.

“Today’s college students are service oriented and volunteer oriented,” said Nikki Toyama-Szeto, Urbana’s Program Director. “At Urbana 12 we are challenging them to move beyond charity to identification with the needy. We hope that the Caregiver project will help them to understand that the gospel message needs to be both demonstrated and proclaimed in order to be effective.”

��Ƶ’s Urbana Student Missions Conference has been held every three years since 2006 in the Edward Jones Dome and the Americas Center in St. Louis. Before that it was held on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Urbana attendance since 1946—when ��Ƶ’s first missions conference was held in Toronto—totals more than 250,000.

��Ƶ Christian Fellowship is a campus ministry which has worked with students and faculty on U.S. campuses for more than 72 years. ��Ƶ has almost 900 chapters active on 576 U.S. colleges and universities, from the Ivy League to community colleges.

For more information:
Gordon Govier
��Ƶ Christian Fellowship
608-443-3688(o)
ggovier@intervarsity.org

News Keywords

World Vision

Urbana 12

HIV/AIDS

World AIDS Day On Campus

webteam@intervarsity.org — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 06:00:00 +0000

News

November 28, 2007

World AIDS Day On Campus

Every day more than 6,000 children lose a parent to AIDS. On or around World AIDS Day, December 1st, many ��Ƶ chapters will join with other student groups to expand AIDS awareness. They’ll be working with World Vision, which is using the theme 6,000 Reasons to Act.

Princess Kasune Zulu lost both of her parents to AIDS and is herself HIV positive. Since speaking at Urbana 06, Princess (her given name, not a title) has been invited by ��Ƶ chapters all over the country to speak on AIDS and related issues. She speaks to many groups as an AIDS advocate and educator through Acting On AIDS, a college-student-initiated ministry of World Vision.

For Princess, AIDS is not a stand-alone issue. “Poverty is the mother of the HIV epidemic,” she says. Lack of education and gender inequality are also AIDS-related. “HIV likes to hide itself where there is denial, where there is stigma, where there is discrimination.”

She is pleased that more and more college students share her fight against AIDS. “It looks different on every campus but the motivation is the same,” she says. “It’s exciting for me to see young people who could have been in this situation to say we want to be the voices for our fellow young people. We want to be the voices for what breaks the heart of God.”

Some student groups have been teaming up with World Vision for much of the fall semester on the 6,000 Challenge. Among their tools are t-shirts designed for AIDS awareness. On some campuses the goal is to get 6,000 students to wear the shirts. Other student groups are collecting 6,000 signatures, or collecting $6,000, or creating some other representation of 6,000.

Some student groups are raising AIDS awareness with a Broken Bread meal, consisting of a porridge made out of corn and soy. In Princess Zulu’s family, and many others left parentless by AIDS, porridge doled out by aid organizations was often their main meal. Since Urbana 06, when the Broken Bread meal was introduced, more than 150 campuses have used it to offer students a chance to identify with part of the AIDS orphan experience. (The meal is also being offered this week as part of Saddleback Church’s Global Summit on AIDS and The Church.)

“I tell people HIV AIDS is not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” says Princess Zulu, who learned of her own HIV status ten years ago at the age of 21. “Our strategies need to continue changing. We need to continue learning. We need to continue praying. It’s not an easy walk.”

After learning of her HIV status, Princess felt God calling her to speak to churches. But the churches rejected her, at least at that time. She found other ways to speak out on AIDS, including through an award-winning radio program in her native Zambia and now through World Vision.

“I like all of the platforms that God has given me,” she says, thankful for the opportunities. “But there’s nothing like speaking to the young people. I tell them, ‘You are not just the leaders for tomorrow, you are the leaders today. If you’ll take the lead, then we’ll have a better world to live in.’”

___

An interview with Princess Kasune Zulu is this week’s ��Ƶ podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast, download the audio, or listen to the interview, by going to ��Ƶ’s audio resources page.

Daily Titan report from California State University Fullerton

News Keywords

HIV/AIDS

A Light on Campus

webteam@intervarsity.org — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 05:00:00 +0000

News

June 14, 2007

A Light on Campus

��Ƶ staff workers at the University of Washington (UW) decided last winter that they wanted evangelism to be a higher priority. A vision team began meeting and praying with the student leadership team. “The phrase that kept coming up in prayer was to be a light on campus,” reported campus staff member Phil Hoffman. “People really started to get excited about that.”

Almost immediately they saw an opportunity to act on their prayers. Students who had been to Urbana 06 and learned about World Vision’s AIDS ministry began talking with staff who were involved in a World Vision-sponsored AIDS outreach at a local church. A decision was made to bring the Acting on AIDS campaign to campus.

“A lot of students in ��Ƶ got on board quickly,” Phil said. They set a goal to sell 2,000 orange T-shirts emblazoned with the word orphan. The number 2,000 represented five percent of the campus population, corresponding with the five percent of children in Africa orphaned by AIDS.

All 2,000 shirts were sold. The campus newspaper reported “a sea of orange flooded the campus.” World Vision staff said it was their largest orange shirt campaign in the country so far.

A rally was held at Red Square in the middle of campus. At least ten students signed up to become sponsors of children with AIDS after the rally. More signed up after visiting an AIDS tent exhibit at a nearby church.

Plans are already being laid to bring the AIDS tent on campus next year. An Acting on AIDS chapter is being formed at the University of Washington, led by ��Ƶ students. The students are learning that social justice issues resonate well with their fellow students and offer a powerful platform for evangelism.

Secular Student Dialogue
Another unique evangelism event presented itself to the students through an unusual coalition with the Secular Student Union (SSU). Phil had met the leaders of the SSU last fall during a religious fair at the student union and decided he wanted to attend some of their meetings.

“I said ‘Hey, you know I’m not actually a student but I work with students. Is it OK if I come?’ I let them know I was a follower of Jesus. And they said ‘Yeah sure, we can use some diversity so it’s not just us agreeing with each other all the time.’”

Phil doesn’t have a strong background in apologetics, but he felt that his family experiences, both growing up and parenting a son born with Down’s syndrome, would help him answer some of the questions that SSU was posing.

“They were asking questions that seemed very relevant to their lives. ‘How can God be good when there’s suffering—like when babies die of SIDS?’ Or ‘Are there miracles any more?’ It’s been a huge learning experience, engaging with their questions.”

As he talks with the SSU students, Phil emphasizes the difference between religion and having a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. The response has been surprisingly positive. Just a couple of weeks ago one student told him, “You know, the more we talk about this the more I like who Jesus is.” Phil said, “It’s always exciting to hear that from someone who is a pretty strong post-modern, non-believer.”

At an atheist convention in Seattle, one of the SSU students met Hemant Mehta, the author of the recent book i>I Sold My Soul on eBay. One thing led to another and soon SSU and ��Ƶ were co-sponsoring an appearance on campus by Jim Henderson, the pastor who won Mehta’s eBay auction. Henderson had invited Mehta to visit various churches and write about the visits on his weblog.

Attendance was about 30, most of whom were atheists curious about Henderson’s message. “He really earned their respect,” Phil reported. “It was really amazing to watch a Christian talk about evangelism and Jesus for an hour and have all these atheists in the room engage with it and listen to what he was saying.”

Phil attributed the success of pastor Henderson’s dialogue with the students to being very honest about his own shortcomings and the shortcomings of religion. “He did a good job of talking about Jesus and who he was and what he stood for,” Phil reported. “He even brought up how Jesus in his time railed against people who were religious but who didn’t know God.” He also apologized for how Christians have mistreated atheists.

“He was very good at asking questions and drawing people out in conversation,” Phil added. After the meeting a small group of attendees went out to dinner to continue the discussion. “It really reminded me of how Jesus interacted with people. It was so neat to see it in somebody up close and personal, how he would get people to dialogue and draw them out.”

Virginia Tech Vigil
When word of the Virginia Tech shooting reached the UW campus, UW officials sponsored a student vigil. The ��Ƶ leaders cancelled their large group meeting that night in order to attend the vigil. Candles were handed out, and a very short program was held. The ��Ƶ students decided to continue in prayer.

“Most of the people who were at the vigil turned around, saw as gathering in a circle to pray, and came over and joined us,” Phil said. They spent the next 45 minutes praying together as the evening’s darkness descended around them. “Here we had been praying last winter, asking God to help us be a light on campus. And now we were all in the middle of campus in Red Square, holding candles, praying for God to bring peace and hope and comfort to families affected in Virginia. It was another incredible opportunity to be a light on campus.”

Afterwards ��Ƶ staff and students were able to have follow-up conversations and prayer times with a number of the prayer vigil attendees. One staff worker has started a GIG (Groups Investigating God Bible study) with one of the attendees.

Looking ahead to the resumption of classes in the fall, Phil has detected a spirit of anticipation growing in his ��Ƶ students. “I think the freshmen especially have seen us do these things and they’ve thought it’s normal, we do this all the time. But we haven’t really done anything like this recently, or even when I was a student five to seven years ago.”

Plans are already being laid for further raising ��Ƶ’s profile on the UW campus. T-shirts are being designed to express the chapter’s new vision statement, “Serve the campus and change the world.”

“We want to keep asking, ‘How can we serve,’” Phil said. “I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.”

___

Photo: Phil Hoffman (left) with students Dale and Ryan.

Get more details on this story by listening to the interview with Phil Hoffman. It’s this week’s ��Ƶ podcast. You can listen or download the interview by going to ��Ƶ’s audio page.

You can make a direct financial donation to support ��Ƶ’s work at the University of Washington by following this link.

News Keywords

Campus Ministry

HIV/AIDS

Evangelism

Mission through the Lens of AIDS

webteam@intervarsity.org — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 06:00:00 +0000

News

March 7, 2007

Evvy Campbell

Mission through the Lens of AIDS

For five days at the end of December 2006, 593 Urbana 06 delegates collectively focused on what it means to live missionally in a world pressed with the numbing reality of forty million people living with HIV/AIDS. Participants in “Mission through the Lens of AIDS,” an Urbana 06 residential track, explored the state of the pandemic, effective programs and opportunities to respond as Christians. Key topics included discerning how the Church can learn from AIDS and learning how the good news of God’s kingdom can bring and manifest hope in places where coping with AIDS is a necessity.

Let Scripture Speak
Attendees who signed up to be part of the track resided together in the Drury Plaza Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, USA—the city where Urbana 06 was held. On the first night, they formed family groups of four to six people. This allowed them to practice on a small scale the type of communal processing and living described in the book of Ephesians, the subject of the “Let Scripture Speak” Bible studies.

Don Everts, ��Ƶ area director from Boulder, Colorado, USA, led these family groups through a study of Ephesians. Everts facilitated the 90-minute sessions, utilizing staff with roving microphones to stimulate group discussion. He included time for individual reflection and prayer as well as large and small group dialog that allowed opportunity for consideration of a biblical response to HIV/AIDS. Similar studies on Ephesians for other delegates were held in sixty-nine additional venues, after which the 22,250 attendees trekked to the Edward Jones Dome, where missionary statesman Ajith Fernando of Sri Lanka led four additional expository sessions on Ephesians.

Engaging the Pandemic through Seminars
The heart of “Mission through the Lens of AIDS” was the thirty-one seminars led by those intimately involved in responding to the pandemic. Speakers were selected by an internationally diverse steering committee co-led by Grace Tazelaar, missions director for Nurses Christian Fellowship, and Jim Thomas, professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Steering committee members Sujai Suneetha, a physician from Hyderabad, India, and his scientist wife, Lavanya, spent over fifteen years in leprosy work and research in different parts of India before God led them to begin a drop-in center in their home that now caters to five hundred HIV-positive persons and their families. The couple spoke eloquently on “Caring for People with HIV/AIDS” and were joined in their presentation by University of Illinois at Chicago infectious disease specialist Dr. Jonathan Uy.

Emmanuel Katongole, a Ugandan Catholic priest and professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke University, also served on the steering committee. Katongole spoke on “Theology through the Lens of AIDS,” drawing on the personal experiences of watching his 21-year-old niece, his eldest brother and ultimately scores of friends in Uganda die of AIDS. Katongole said, “I found myself raising more questions than I or anybody had answers for—as it soon became clear that with HIV/AIDS we had entered a new kairos, a moment of truth, in which AIDS was killing not only our bodies but also our usual and comfortable ways of being church and what it means for us to be God’s people.”

Jane Wathome, founder of Beacon of Hope in Kenya, led seminars on “Income Generation to AIDS-Stricken Communities.” Wathome’s ministry began in 2002 through listening to the needs expressed by women in the impoverished community of Ongata Rongai. Starting with the production of textiles, Beacon of Hope has grown to include childcare and orphaned child sponsorship, a feeding program, medical assistance, training in home based care, spiritual guidance, group support therapy, HIV testing and counseling and a youth program. To accommodate the rapidly expanding programs, Beacon of Hope has purchased an eight-acre parcel of land and is embarking on the development of a self-sustaining community initiative that will continue to serve women, children and youth affected and infected by HIV/AIDS and poverty.

As an HIV-positive person, Christopher Yuan shared how his past addiction and drug trafficking led to a three-year federal prison term, during which he was informed by a prison nurse that he had contracted HIV. Alone in his prison cell, he noticed a reference to Jeremiah 29:11 scrawled on the metal bunk above him. At the time of his trial, Yuan began reading a Gideon Bible he had found in a garbage can. “At the most hopeless time in my life, God met me and told me he had plans for me, plans to give me a future and a hope. It was at that point that I submitted to him and relinquished control,” Yuan said.

A documentary produced by CrossRoads and shot on location in South Africa, Russia, Jamaica and the United States relates the thought-provoking stories of Yuan and three other HIV-positive Christians who not only share a grave diagnosis but a sustaining hope in Christ.

Deborah Dortzbach and W. Meredith Long’s i>The AIDS Crisis: What We Can Do (��Ƶ, 2006) was also introduced at Urbana 06. Colleagues at World Relief with a combined forty years of engagement with the pandemic, Dortzbach and Long draw readers into responding to HIV/AIDS through vignettes of those whose lives have been changed by AIDS. Solid information interlaced with study questions and online resources enable readers to take the next step in both personally responding to AIDS and in stimulating their churches to do so.

Long presented with Stella Kasirye, who has directed World Relief’s AIDS initiatives in Malawi, to speak on “Church Partnerships: Tackling AIDS Together.” In a “Sex, Sexuality, Gender and HIV/AIDS” seminar, Kasirye dealt with the issues of poverty that force women into sexual slavery.

Paul Robinson, director of Wheaton College’s (Wheaton, Illinois, USA) HNGR (Human Needs Global Resources) internship program, addressed the social and economic inequities that propel the pandemic, while Serge Duss of World Vision outlined strategies for AIDS advocacy.

Experiencing AIDS
A “Broken Bread Meal for AIDS” gave Urbana 06 participants the opportunity to develop a physical awareness of hunger and its impact on a community. A simple meal of corn soy porridge, fortified with vitamins and minerals and easily digestible for those living with AIDS, was served to all conference participants. Such a meal is commonly provided by relief and development organizations to hungry communities. Participants were also given a card that contained ideas for discussion and prayer as well as the stories of people living with AIDS.

World Vision and the North American Millers’ Association partnered with Urbana in providing the recipe and the ingredients for the meal, which were sent to the convention chefs to test. Urbana director Jim Tebbe reported that the chefs rebelled, saying students would not eat the porridge, additional heavy duty trash bags would have to be ordered for the discarded food, the meal would go down in infamy and they did not want their names attached to it. But Urbana staff insisted and eight tons of gruel was prepared.

In plenary sessions, delegates were informed of the purpose of the meal and responded to the challenge, eating virtually all the gruel. Money saved with this meal went toward the conference offering of $1,212,000USD. Robert Zachvitz, a World Vision senior policy advisor, urged students to host Broken Bread Meals on their campuses. Bible study guides together with packets of the corn-soy mixture are available through www.actingonaids.org.

^{This is a shortened version of an article that appeared in the March issue of the Lausanne World Pulse magazine. Used by permission. Dr. Evvy Hay Campbell is associate professor of intercultural studies at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.}

News Keywords

HIV/AIDS

Urbana

World AIDS Day

webteam@intervarsity.org — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 06:00:00 +0000

News

November 30, 2006

World AIDS Day

The United Nations reports that nearly 40 million people in the world are infected with HIV/AIDS. In some countries in southern Africa, one third of the population is infected. In light of this suffering, ��Ƶ will offer a track at Urbana 06, Mission through the Lens of AIDS.

Urbana 06 is ��Ƶ’s Student Missions Convention that will be held in St Louis, Missouri, December 27-31, 2006. More than 20,000 attendees are expected.

A new book, i>The AIDS Crisis: What We Can Do, has just been published by ��Ƶ Press. The book is written by Deborah Dortzbach, international director for HIV/AIDS programs with World Relief, and Meredith Long, vice president for planning and integration at World Relief. Both are directly involved with efforts to mobilize the local church in the campaign to combat HIV/AIDS around the world.

Urbana’s AIDS track will be led by Dr. James Thomas, director of the Program in Public Health Ethics at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. The leadership team includes Emmanuel Katongole, associate professor at Duke Divinity School and Grace Tazelaar, missions director for Nurses Christian Fellowship.

Dr. Thomas and Dr. Katongole have developed a program outline that includes medical and historical background about the epidemic and a response that Christians may make individually and through their church. Participants will look at the AIDS epidemic as a means to foster mercy, compassion, justice, reconciliation, humility, and unity, characteristics that God desires for his church. Drs. Thomas and Katongole understand AIDS offers American churches an opportunity to relearn biblical views about sexuality, the roles of women in societies, and racial reconciliation. The track participants will be encouraged to approach the suffering of their brothers and sisters with humility, sensitivity, and God’s love.

Grace Tazelaar brings a rich background in AIDS work to the Urbana 06 track. In the late 1980s, when the epidemic was first evident in Africa, Ms. Tazelaar was working as a pubic health nurse in Uganda. She was invited by government officials to help develop a response to the illness. The result of their work was the well known ABC program, which emphasizes abstaining from sex outside marriage, being faithful to your spouse, and condom use. However, Ms. Tazelaar is convinced that even a successful program like ABC is not the sole solution, that the war against AIDS is a spiritual battle. When advances are made against this disease, glory should be given to God.

The Mission Through the Lens of AIDS track will emphasize that there are no quick fixes to solving the problem of AIDS. But we can learn. We can pray. And we can act to support those who are suffering.

Learn:
i>The AIDS Crisis: What We Can Do, a new ��Ƶ Press book
Urbana, World AIDS Day
Urbana, Ryan’s Stories
Urbana, Emmanuel’s Story
Urbana, Ses’khona
Mission Network News coverage
2006 Global Summit on AIDS and the Church: Race Against Time at Saddleback Church
Kaiser Network
United Nations
General Statistics

Pray:
IFES – AFRICA
IFES – Uganda
Global AIDS Prayer Partnership

Act:
World Vision: website – article
World Relief

News Keywords

HIV/AIDS

Urbana

San Diego ��Ƶ Chapters Make an Impact

webteam@intervarsity.org — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 06:00:00 +0000

News

November 15, 2006

San Diego ��Ƶ Chapters Make an Impact

Almost 26 million Africans are infected with HIV/AIDS, 700,000 of them children. Every 15 seconds a child in Africa loses a parent to AIDS, and as a result 14 million children are orphaned.

Hearing such mind-boggling statistics does little to mobilize this generation of students; it’s too big, too impersonal. And although many college students rise to the occasion when disasters and tragedies occur, still others sit in the background, because they feel either helpless or apathetic.

��Ƶ chapters around San Diego recognize that we live in a postmodern society—that individual experience speaks more to this generation than do facts and statistics. San Diego ��Ƶ chapters are using that understanding to their advantage by presenting an event in which a student pretends to be a specific child in Africa. They have responded to the challenge of turning AIDS from a far-off pandemic to an urgent, personal issue in demand of a response.

In partnership with World Vision, a worldwide Christian humanitarian organization, and area churches, ��Ƶ has been reaching students by setting up a traveling exhibit on college campuses around San Diego. The exhibit is spending time on each San Diego campus from September through December. It transports students experientially into the plight of specific children affected by AIDS—and then asks the students to respond.

At the beginning of the exhibit, each person receives an MP3 player that will guide them through one of three unique routes in a tent. Each route tells the story of a different child affected by AIDS. Visual aids, such as photos of the child, objects found in an African village, and facts about the child help the student enter into the child’s life.

At the end of the route, the student enters a new part of the tent, a sterile square room with benches. It’s a health clinic where the student simulates taking an AIDS test. The last section of the tent is a chapel, a circular enclave which displays hundreds of photos showing Africans with AIDS. If they choose, each student can write down a thought or prayer and pin it to the wall.

After exiting the tent, each participant is met by an ��Ƶ student. The chapter members ask questions to discover where people find their hope when they are confronted with such dire circumstances. It is the desire of ��Ƶ students, during this conversation, to proclaim God’s good news in the midst of terrible suffering. The ��Ƶ student invites each person to share in God’s concern and care for the poor, and to respond to what they experienced by giving money, sponsoring a child, or praying. The staff advisor at the University of San Diego, Jesse Jacobs, said, “We wanted to challenge the campus to consider the spiritual significance of poverty and injustice in the world.”

Unfortunately, talking with students at the end of the route through the tent provoked some censure about what purpose ��Ƶ was serving. In a newspaper at MiraCosta College, several students criticized ��Ƶ for using a bait and switch tactic. Penny Webber said, “I thought it was a good thing to learn about, until the end, when you speak to the people. Instead of talking about AIDS, you’re talking about religion.”

But for ��Ƶ students, to separate AIDS and other global tragedies from God’s response to them is to not give credence to the breadth of the problem. Marlena Copado, who is president of the ��Ƶ chapter at MiraCosta, and who was raised by the Bantu tribe in Africa, responded eloquently to the accusations in a letter to the editor. She said, “For us at ��Ƶ Christian Fellowship, we believe God truly cares about the issue of AIDS in Africa, and he is a crucial part of the solution. The world’s problems are too big for us to divorce our faith from social action.” While there was some negative reaction, the majority of students responded positively to the event.

At the University of California—San Diego, nearly 5,000 students went through the tent. At the end of the week, about 1,300 students attended the follow-up AIDS conference. Combined, these two events at UCSD led to some amazing outcomes. Students gave $30,000 for an AIDS community project in Malawi. Also, many students made the decision to sponsor a child through World Vision, and now 128 children will have proper medicine, food, and the chance to go to school. And just fewer than 30 students became Christians after experiencing and hearing about Christ’s redemptive work in a suffering world. Similar results have taken place at other campuses around San Diego.

For the most part, the response has been outstanding: a testament to the power of experience for this generation. The ��Ƶ staff around San Diego hopes that students whose interest was sparked by the tent will further explore God’s desire concerning AIDS by attending the AIDS track at Urbana 06, ��Ƶ’s 21st Student Missions Convention.

With the kind of success that San Diego ��Ƶ chapters have experienced, ��Ƶ looks forward to seeing how God uses Urbana to call people to take action against the AIDS crisis. A similar tent will be stationed at the conference; instead of following the lives of three children it will follow the lives of six. Through events like Impact 1, ��Ƶ students address tragedy both physically and spiritually. God wants Christians to act when they see injustice, and in so doing bring more people into his kingdom. ��Ƶ chapters around San Diego have responded to God’s call to action.

News Keywords

HIV/AIDS Will Be A Priority Issue at Urbana 06

webteam@intervarsity.org — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:00:00 +0000

Press Room

December 1, 2005

HIV/AIDS Will Be A Priority Issue at Urbana 06

News Release
For Immediate Release

(Madison, WI) — The United Nations reports that nearly 40 million people in the world are infected with HIV/AIDS. In some countries in southern Africa, one third of the population is infected. In light of this suffering, ��Ƶ will offer an AIDS track at Urbana 06, the student missions convention to be held in St Louis, Missouri, December 27-31, 2006.

The track will be led by Dr. James Thomas, director of the Program in Public Health Ethics at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. The leadership team includes Emmanuel Katongole, associate professor at Duke Divinity School and Grace Tazelaar, missions director for Nurses Christian Fellowship.

The Urbana 06 AIDS track will emphasize that there are no quick fixes to solving the problem of AIDS. But we can learn. We can pray. And we can act to support those who are suffering.

For additional information, please contact:
Christy Chappell
Urbana Communications Director
608/443-3688
cchappell@intervarsity.org

News Keywords

HIV/AIDS

Press Release

HIV/AIDS

AIDS Caregiver Kits Assembly

AIDS Caregiver Kits Assembly

World AIDS Day On Campus

World AIDS Day On Campus

A Light on Campus

A Light on Campus

Mission through the Lens of AIDS

Mission through the Lens of AIDS

World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day

San Diego ������Ƶ Chapters Make an Impact

San Diego ������Ƶ Chapters Make an Impact

HIV/AIDS Will Be A Priority Issue at Urbana 06

HIV/AIDS Will Be A Priority Issue at Urbana 06

San Diego ��Ƶ Chapters Make an Impact

San Diego ��Ƶ Chapters Make an Impact