kam
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Peter Kithene | Seattle, Washington
Native Kenyan Peter Kithene became an orphan at 12 years of age when an undiagnosed disease took the lives of his parents and six of his siblings.
Vowing to one day make life better for rural Kenyans, Kithene determined his best option was to excel at school, despite objections from relatives and friends that he should stay at home to take care of three younger siblings.
Kithene was accepted into a prestigious high school in Nairobi and then attended the University of Washington at Seattle. Midway through his undergraduate studies, he raised money for a health clinic in his family's village and opened it two years ago.
To date, Kithene's Mama Maria clinic has provided services to more than 18,000 patients who previously had no medical care. He hopes to build a bigger clinic and launch an HIV testing program in the future.
Posts: 15927 | From Became too sick to work or do household chores in 2001. | Registered: Dec 2002
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kam
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Aaron Jackson grew up in Destin, Florida, a self-proclaimed child of privilege with golf and sunshine filling most of his days.
Aaron Jackson says, "We've become like family. ... These kids are my kids."
In his early 20s he decided to travel, and the experience changed his life. "It really opened my eyes to what the world was really like," he says.
As a result of witnessing extreme poverty abroad, Jackson quit college and eventually headed to Haiti to help children.
In 2004, with money he had earned as a caddie on the golf course, Jackson began setting up orphanages with the help of the Homeless Voice newspaper in Florida.
When he learned that the often-swollen bellies of the children he met were the result of worms, he made it his personal crusade to combat Haiti's infestation with education and deworming medicine. Watch Jackson talk about his mission to help the children of Haiti �
According to the U.N. World Food Program, an estimated half of Haiti's 8 million residents live with internal parasites. The Haitian Ministry of Health estimates that in some areas of the country, worms infect more than 40 percent of the children.
"The worms eat up to about 20 percent of a child's nutritional intake each day," Jackson said. "This is the difference between life and death in a lot of situations."
Don't Miss In Depth CNN Heroes How to help: Planting Peace It only takes $20 to cure a child, Jackson said. Since starting his project in Haiti, he has helped raise about $200,000 to support his work. The money flow is spotty at times, but he said he always gets funds when he needs them.
"If the money runs down, I always look in my mailbox and find a check. ... I don't know how they hear about me, but people do, and the money is there."
He helps run four orphanages, an intestinal parasite program and some medical centers in Haiti. He's handed out about 20,000 deworming pills in Haiti and educated Haitians about ways to prevent getting the disease, such as washing their vegetables, cooking meat a little longer and wearing shoes outdoors.
By the end of the year, Jackson's organization, Planting Peace, said it will have helped deworm an estimated 1.7 million people worldwide.
"When we first go into an orphanage, the children look very zombie-like. And it's a scary thing," Jackson said. But the deworming pills have a positive effect in only weeks. "They come back to life. ... You can see that they're playing again and smiling."
At the orphanages he helps support, Jackson is known as "Papa Jackson." Watch Jackson discuss his orphanage effort
To make ends meet, he usually sleeps in a homeless shelter when back in Florida. He takes no pay for his work, but Jackson said he can't imagine doing anything else with his time and effort.
"We've become like family. ... These kids are my kids."
Posts: 15927 | From Became too sick to work or do household chores in 2001. | Registered: Dec 2002
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kam
Honored Contributor (10K+ posts)
Member # 3410
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More to come....
Posts: 15927 | From Became too sick to work or do household chores in 2001. | Registered: Dec 2002
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