#HIV/AIDS

I recently announced a storytelling project I’m working on called My Favorite Joburg People. I chose four people in Joburg, each of whom has an amazing story to tell, and interviewed them and shot their portraits. I’ll be presenting the stories and portraits at an event called Translating Joburg – Storytellers, and also publishing them on my blog. This is the third of the four stories.

Last week I went to Swaziland for a freelance assignment. The assignment was with Samaritan’s Purse UK, a charitable organization that does disaster relief and community development projects around the world. I went to Swaziland to take photos and write stories about the work Samaritan’s Purse is doing in a remote mountain community called Kaphunga.

Yesterday I attended a special event for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF). The event celebrated the end of an eight-year project – called Project HEART – that provided HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment services in South Africa. I don’t want to go all technical on you and try to explain what Project HEART was. But if you’d like to learn more, visit this page on the EGPAF site. There’s a great video about Project HEART about halfway down the page.

I first visited Africa four years ago, through my work as a writer for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF for short). Many of my assignments involved visiting health clinics and schools in various African countries, meeting beneficiaries of EGPAF’s programs and writing stories about the people and places I visited. These assignments changed my life.