World Vision Experience

August 16, 2007 | T. Suzanne Eller

My good friend, author and speaker Keri Wyatt Kent, shares her experience of a virtual World Vision tour. This is an excerpt from her post:

I had the most amazing experience yesterday. It touched my heart, and I hope, changed me. I hope it made me into a more empathetic person, one who cares more deeply. Have you ever wondered what would it be like to a child living in poverty?

What would it be like to lose both your parents, to HIV/AIDS, and find yourself shunned and ridiculed as a result? To wonder if you too will die of what Africans call “the Big Disease”?

Yesterday, I had a chance to find out. I finally managed to visit the World Vision Experience: Step into Africa. This traveling exhibit is making its way across the country, educating Americans about AIDS in Africa and hopefully, signing up folks like you and me to sponsor children affected by this pandemic.

Volunteers set up what looks like an African shanty town, a jumble of huts with thatch and corrugated tin roofs, dirty curtains, threadbare blankets, in a church gym.

When you begin, you’re handed an iPod Shuffle (the postage stamp sized one) with earphones, so that you can hear the audio portion (um, it’s a very cool “world Vision orange” iPod, but you have to give it back at the end of the exhibit). The audio guides you through the exhibit, in which you learn the story of one of four children. You see the AIDS crisis not through mind-numbing statistics, but through the life of a real child. For 20 to 30 minutes, you are that child.

It really sucks to be that child. 

Read the rest of Keri’s post at Boomerbabesrock blog.

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