NEF 2005 Annual Report - Near East Foundation

ian Stanhouse, who worked after school as a bagger in a grocery store, donated 10 percent of his
paycheck, which he got his parents to match, plus involved his relatives in the cause. Some teachers,
like Carol Bertsch, challenged their classes by pledging to match their contributions, in her case
$1,700. A collection table manned during lunchtime in the school cafeteria began at about $20 the first day,
then exploded, reaching $2,400, even $4,000! Almost every club and organization on campus took on the
project—the orchestra raised $500 in a concert and the basketball team’s silent auction garnered $1,500.
Eventually checks sent to the Near East Foundation
in New York passed their $10,000 goal to support
NEF-Lesotho Country Director Ken Storen’s work
with orphaned and abandoned AIDS babies. That
was the spirit permeating Houston’s Kingwood High
School, introduced to the plight of Lesotho’s
orphans by teachers Courtney Wheeler and
Jennifer Orenic, ex-Peace Corps volunteers in
Lesotho and good friends of Ken. “I was thinking
maybe we’d make a thousand,” confessed Ms.
Wheeler, a special education teacher of students
with moderate to severe disabilities of all kinds. But
in just four weeks, “We were running through the
halls, yelling, ‘We got it!’ ‘We got it!’”
In total nearly $110,000 was contributed this year to
the Near East Foundation to support NEF-Country
Director Storen’s AIDS orphan project, an enormous outpouring of generosity.
Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho before becoming the Near East Foundation’s Lesotho Country
Director, Ken Storen well knows the hugely tragic dimensions of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in Africa. The
number of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to more than double by
2010, requiring one billion dollars annually to care for them, according to UNICEF, the United Nations
children’s agency. An unprecedented “drastic deterioration in children’s lives” will likely see more than 24
million children face AIDS-inflicted poverty, UNICEF says. Currently Africa is home to some 40 million
orphans and that number may shoot to 50 million in the next five years in sub-Saharan African where 60 to
80 percent of the cases are AIDS-related.