Turning the tide on AIDS
June 13, 2010
Casta.net
You don't have to be a grandmother to support this cause.
Dubbed the Stride To Turn The Tide On AIDS, Saturday's first annual walk in City Park was one of several hundred simultaneously happening across Canada this weekend.
Bearing donations and pledges for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, the modest group of about 20 citizens wove through City Park on Saturday morning, bringing awareness to the incredible burden African grandmothers face.
“We just feel that we have so much to help support the grandmothers in their need,” says Norma Laing, chair of the Kelowna Grandmothers for Africa.
“There are about 14 million orphans in Africa, about sixty percent of those are being raised in grandmother households."
As HIV/AIDS continues to devastate sub-Saharan Africa, grandmothers are often the only surviving adult family member left to care for young children.
“All our emphasis is on supporting grandmothers in Africa who are raising their grandchildren because the middle generation has died of AIDS.”
Sandi Evans, also a member of the Kelowna Grandmothers For Africa, has seen first hand the devastation of HIV/AIDS.
“It's just unimaginable. The struggle that they have to be burying their children and then raising their grandchildren. It is just too hard to imagine,” says Evans.
The grandmothers who begin caring for their young grandchildren require adequate living quarters, financing for school fees, and transportation.
Event organizers hope to have enough people participating nationally to theoretically have walked the 8,000 kilometres across Canada.