Malawi Children's Village is a social services organization run collaboratively by American volunteers and local villagers. It is on the outskirts of Mangochi, one of the poorest districts in one of the smallest and most impoverished nations in Africa. Malawi Children's Village provides food, medical care and money for school to more than 3,500 AIDS orphans -- those who have lost one or both parents to the disease -- in dozens of surrounding villages. Medical personnel treat the sickest and most malnourished children at an infirmary on the compound, but most of the work is done as outreach so that children can remain in their own villages where relatives or neighbors can help raise them.
Malawi Children's Village is a social services organization run collaboratively by American volunteers and local villagers
Women help kids orphaned by AIDS
Albany -- Benefit to raise money for children in Malawi, one of Africa's poorest nations
By PAUL GRONDAHL, Staff writer
First published: Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Two Albany women are raising money for children orphaned by AIDS in Malawi in southeastern Africa by organizing a hip-hop/spoken-word benefit performance at a local club.
Lily Mercogliano and Megan Schmidt Root are bringing the Albany band Broadcast Live to Valentine's on Friday to benefit Malawi Children's Village.
Mercogliano and Root traveled to Malawi two summers ago. They worked as volunteer teachers at Malawi Children's Village, formed in 1997 by former Peace Corps volunteers, including Root's father, who worked in Malawi in the '60s.
Mercogliano, 20, an Albany High School graduate, is a senior at Northeastern University in Boston. Root, 29, of Albany, is a teacher at The Free School, a private alternative school in Albany.
Malawi Children's Village is a social services organization run collaboratively by American volunteers and local villagers. It is on the outskirts of Mangochi, one of the poorest districts in one of the smallest and most impoverished nations in Africa.
A U.N. report released Thursday listed Malawi among the seven sub-Saharan nations hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic, where high rates of HIV infection have caused life expectancy to drop below 40 years.
Malawi Children's Village provides food, medical care and money for school to more than 3,500 AIDS orphans -- those who have lost one or both parents to the disease -- in dozens of surrounding villages.
Medical personnel treat the sickest and most malnourished children at an infirmary on the compound, but most of the work is done as outreach so that children can remain in their own villages where relatives or neighbors can help raise them.
Root first visited Malawi in 1997 as part of an internship through Grinnell College in Iowa. She and Mercogliano worked together as peer counselors in HIV/AIDS education outreach work at Equinox in Albany several years ago.
They traveled together to Malawi in the summer of 2002 and taught English, biology and math to 50 teenagers, under a mango tree, using one tattered textbook and painted plywood for a blackboard.
"The more money we can raise, the more education they can do, the more wells they can drill, the more medicine they can buy," Mercogliano said by telephone from Boston, where she is taking summer courses at Northeastern.
