Dear friends,

We would like to tell you something about our project in the Kalahari Desert.

We finally have succeeded in founding our charity, “MOSAICO EUROAFRICANO ONLUS”. We have been allowed to enlarge the buildings which were already there on the land we have been donated.

In the Ghanzi District, in the Kalahari Desert, lived about 7,550 people in 1991, and this number has doubled up to now. The first case of AIDS was registered in 1987, by the year 2000 the people having got AIDS were already 528.

Malaria or any other infectious disease can cause people to die because their immune system has grown weak. The Ministry of Health gives a lot of information on the subject, but the population does not seem to understand the gravity of the situation: malarial patients suffer from aches in their joints and high fever, somebody with TB keeps on coughing, while HIV positive people do not show any symptom of the disease at the very beginning. Hence, this “new plague” is not taken into the due consideration.

More and more parents die, leaving their children – sometimes HIV positive as well – orphaned. Better living conditions and a proper medical assistance can give a high chance of survival to HIV positive children. We already handed over the location plan of a small hospital for 20 patients to the Ministry of Health last year.

They made us change our project. What people now need is not an hospital but a Day-Care Centre for orphaned children with its own small pediatric ward.

More than 700 orphaned children were registered in the Ghanzi District alone in the year 2000. We think that the building of a foster home is the best way to help this needy region. We have raised about ? 90,000,000 up to now, an amount which will let us go on building our Day-Care Centre for orphaned children with its own paediatric ward. Work will begin in 2002. Anyway, this is just the beginning of a long, long way. We must persist with our efforts, because our project needs financial help constantly to become true. We rely on your solidarity!

Group for Solidarity with the Children of the Kalahari Desert