It’s Christmas 3 years ago and I am sitting at home thinking our family should donate to something – maybe sponsor a child, help a project. At that time I was creating a project for women in prison where quilters from the outside community teach the inmates to make baby blankets. I’m seeing the women, inmates and outside quilters, sharing stories of their lives and families and helping and contributing to each other. This is very special! Communities connecting!

I am so inspired, a few months later I find myself collecting money to send to Africa for a group that supported aids orphans. By some miracle a part of this money makes it way to a white farmer’s wife Ezelle who is struggling to take care of 40 orphaned children, some of whom have HIV/AIDS, on her farm three hours south of Chiredzi. She needs help! The property has been repossessed and overrun by invaders (zanu war veterans) under the Mugabe government scheme. She has retrenched her workers and the children are starving. The community is in poor nutritional condition being assisted by NGOs with one porridge meal a day.

I was so inspired by her commitment to the children, her passion and drive to make a difference to the local community I found myself on a flight to Harare City in in Zimbabwe to go visit them

I listened to stories of abandonment and sexual assault. I felt, at a deep level, the sadness that surrounded their lives and often found myself with tears running down my face. Many were dying from AIDS related diseases and malnutrition – evidence of struggle, poverty and violence. Ezelle was committed to creating a life for these children and the community around them and had begun a project to develop a village for the children, Lirhanzo Children’s Village. A daunting task in that economic and political environment

Aid For a Africa Down Under was born - Registered in Australia on the 15th of January 2004 as a non-profit, non-government charitable company, which encourages communities, in partnership, to create and develop hands-on projects in meeting the care, health and education needs of HIV/AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children throughout Africa; to be self reliant, to support each other and to create opportunities for their sustainable future.
Today communities in Australia and internationally communicate and connect with communities in Africa - ordinary people doing extraordinary things!

Girls on Top are an extraordinary group of women who took on a challenge to climb Kilimanjaro to raise money for a water project in Zimbabwe in 2004. Today the children at the Lirhanzo Children’s Village and surrounding communities enjoy water and fresh vegetables because of the contribution they made. This project has impacted communities other villages who are now seeing how they can make a difference too. More communties connecting - something we do in Africa which enriches all our lives, and something which Girls on Top do around the world, carrying our spirit with them as they go.