At 7am this morning (and every morning except Sundays), more than 30 kids came to the Gwaimen Center in Kwoi, where I work. About half of them are HIV+, so they start their day by taking ARVs to go with their breakfast. Most of them go to school until 12:30 then they return for lunch, baths, naptime. Then we usually spend a couple hours working on their reading, writing, and math, and playing, of course. In the evening, they head home with dinner and another dose of ARVs.

They didn’t follow this regiment because it’s World AIDS Day. This is what they do everyday. For the HIV+ children, their lives include CD4 counts, visits to the doctor, ARVs and their side-effects, and for nearly all of them, the loss or sickness of an HIV+ parent.

Yesterday, I was at the Center and hanging out with the kids. We were reading a book about kittens and practicing the alphabet – really notable stuff. And Precious, a one-year-old was sitting on my lap. They don’t know her HIV status yet because the test is more definitive once they are 18 months or 2 years old. But her mom is HIV+ (and a cook at the Center), and her brother Vincent is 3 and HIV+ (and a total handful). I just had to wonder what her life would look like. Our Executive Director, Beatrice Kadangs, always says “You’re either infected or you’re affected.”

People are campaigning hard to stop the spread of AIDS. One of the most powerful things I’ve heard is a commercial on TV, asking us to imagine an AIDS-free generation (and giving tools to prevent infections).

It’s a dream I think we all should share in and work towards – a world without AIDS.

-Anne Batchelder, ONE member, former ONE Deputy Director of Field, and founder of the Gwaimen Center in Kwoi, Nigeria

When I started working for the ONE Campaign in 2005 I had just come back from a year in Ghana, working on small-scale economic community development projects. Working for ONE, and advocating for ONE’s core issues, it was very real to me that we were working to help families support themselves through life-saving medicines, important clean water and hygiene programs, and through creating economic opportunities by making trade more fair – the kinds of things that people in Ghana desperately needed.

Now, I am back in Africa – Nigeria, this time, and again working on a community development project – the Gwaimen Center, a community-based sustainability center to support widows and orphans in Kwoi, Nigeria. Now that things have come full circle, I am now seeing the fruits of ONE’s arduous labors.

During my first week here, we stopped at a clinic in Kagoro to visit a friend. One of the first things that I noticed was this sign. “USAID had been here – from the American people.”

I suddenly had the clearest image of members of ONE’s amazing dedicated staff (whom I miss greatly!), ONE volunteers from around the country, and the 2.4 million ONE supporters, calling their leaders and asking them to support important initiatives like this. ONE is on the front lines – fighting for things that make a difference in the lives of people in other countries – from the American people.

I’ve only been here two weeks, so will continue to send stories from the ground!

-Anne Batchelder, ONE member, former ONE Deputy Field Director, and founder of the Gwaimen Center in Kwoi, Nigeria

The Daily Trust newspaper in Abuja, Nigeria reported on Wednesday that over 110 million Nigerians have malaria. This shockingly high burden of disease is costing the country about $7 billion per year in treatment for the disease and the country is losing another $1 billion per year in lost productivity because employee absenteeism and subsidized malaria treatment.

You can read the story here:

About 90% of all malaria deaths globally occur in Africa, where a child dies of the disease every 30 seconds. More than 350 million people become severely ill each year. This is a preventable and treatable disease. Though the news from Nigeria is tragic, there is also good news in the progress against malaria. Kenya reduced childhood deaths by 44% in two years with a rapid expansion of malaria control programs. ACTs costing roughly $2 per dose could treat the men, women and children who fall victim to this disease and dramatically reduce the number of deaths from malaria.

The good news here makes it all the more tragic that so many people are dying primarily because they got bitten by a mosquito and don’t have access to even basic medical care. It is our hope that the next president of the United States will continue to ramp up our nation’s spending on malaria. If you are at a campaign event with a candidate, please ask them what he or she will do if elected president to stop malaria!

-Josh Lozman, ONE Vote ‘08 Policy Director

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is not usually considered a model country in the fight against AIDS. The statistics are devastating – around 3 million of Nigeria’s 140 million people are currently living with the deadly disease. The country currently has the third highest number of HIV/AIDS infections after India and South Africa. Nigeria’s plan for controlling the spread of AIDS initially involved building new treatment centers to provide free drug therapy for around 250,000 people by the end of 2006. However, after failing to meet targets, major donors were skeptical about the way in which their funding was being spent.

The Nigerian AIDS control agency announced today that the momentum has recently started to pick up: the number of HIV/AIDS patients receiving treatment in Nigeria has tripled over the last year. An increase in treatment centers, from 74 to 210, has enabled 135,000 people (95,000 more than the previous year) to receive treatment. However, recent estimates indicate that only 10 percent of Nigerian HIV sufferers have been receiving treatment. ActionAid has previously deemed Nigeria as being high in the “AIDS league of shame”. Hopefully they will continue their progression, and become a model of success rather than a permanent fixture in the “league of shame”.

-Elizabeth Gregg, ONE Government Affairs & Policy Intern