{"id":6550,"date":"2006-08-12T00:38:57","date_gmt":"2006-08-12T00:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/follow-me.html"},"modified":"2006-08-12T00:38:57","modified_gmt":"2006-08-12T00:38:57","slug":"follow-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/follow-me.html","title":{"rendered":"Follow me"},"content":{"rendered":"

A CNS story about a school for AIDS orphans in Kenya:<\/a><\/p>\n

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In 2002, Oganda and his friends formed their own nongovernmental organization, Hands of Love Society, and began paying school fees for orphans. However, schools increased fees as soon as they discovered an organization was paying for the student. Staff also subtly discriminated against the AIDS orphans, Oganda said.<\/p>\n

The friends decided to open their own school to fights AIDS by injecting hope into Kibera, forming young people with a Christian identity who believe in the future, said Oganda.<\/p>\n

"The environment itself is very challenging," he said. "In this environment people — they think they don’t have a future. They’re just there, waiting for what they get today or tomorrow. … We give them hope. We want to create a future for them. It’s to tell them that, sure, you have also been brought up in that (poverty), but you have a key. When you are educated you will be able to come out of this," he said.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Dionisio Kiambi, the principal, has no trouble keeping or attracting teachers, despite low wages and tough conditions. The teachers scramble through the alleyways of Kibera between the two little groupings of classrooms on the hillside; the classrooms do not have enough books, no real laboratory, no computers, just chalk dust and beat-up desks. But the teachers find a set of values and standards which give them a chance at success.<\/p>\n

"Most of our teachers are Catholic. We are talking about a Catholic education," said Kiambi, an original member of the Christian Life Community.<\/p>\n

The school also forms young Christians. In June, 20 students finished the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and were baptized.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A story from Norman, Oklahoma about an Indian priest who had ministered there for a few years, then returned to India with a purpose:<\/a><\/p>\n

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\n

Burdened with a sense of responsibility and love for the people of his native country, India, Father Alphonse Gollapalli envisioned a way to meet both the needs of the community and ease his heart.
An idea was born, and plans were made to open a school, a boarding house for up to 30 boys.
Tucking away his income earned during a three-year stay in Oklahoma as the associate pastor at St. Joseph\u2019s Catholic Church and a parish in Woodward, Gollapalli worked steadily toward his dream, which was fulfilled in June 2005.
Nestled in between mountains on five acres, the Nitya Sahaya Matha Parish in Tripurantakam is now home to more than 40 children, all of whom hail from desperate poverty, Gollapalli said.
\u201cThe families send their children here because they realize, if they can get an education, they can do something with their lives,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A CNS story about a school for AIDS orphans in Kenya: In 2002, Oganda and his friends formed their own nongovernmental organization, Hands of Love Society, and began paying school fees for orphans. However, schools increased fees as soon as they discovered an organization was paying for the student. Staff also subtly discriminated against the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFollow me - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/follow-me.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Follow me - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A CNS story about a school for AIDS orphans in Kenya: In 2002, Oganda and his friends formed their own nongovernmental organization, Hands of Love Society, and began paying school fees for orphans. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}