Online Archives

On-line

VOL. 13, NO. 10

New graduate returns to Zimbabwe to combat AIDS

By Joyce DeGirolamo

United Methodist News Service

Upon graduating from college, Rebekah Chilcote isnt going to find her place in the world. Instead, she is going to find children living with AIDS half a world away.

Chilcote, 22, graduates this month from United Methodist-related Baldwin-Wallace College and is preparing for a yearlong trip to Zimbabwe, Africa, where about 220 people die daily from AIDS. She will be armed with a degree in psychology and a grant from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.

Her trip in August wont be a journey into the unknown. She already knows what she will find: children whose parents have died of AIDS and some who will themselves be infected with the deadly virus. The plight of Zimbabwes children will be familiar to Chilcote because she will be going home again.

The child of United Methodist missionaries, she spent five years in Africa three in Kenya and two in Zimbabwe. Though she was only a teen-ager while in Mutare, Zimbabwe, she remembers the language and the sights of the children in the orphanage where she assisted her mother, a volunteer worker.

When I was in Zimbabwe, my most favorite thing to do was to go to the orphanage to play with the kids and take care of them, she recalls. They became like younger siblings, like family, to me.

One boy, in particular, is still close to her heart. Aaron was a three-month-old, AIDS-infected baby when she met him. He is no longer alive, but he remains in her thoughts, and he was one of the reasons she wanted to return to the orphanage at the Old Mutare Mission, where she will help the children through research she will conduct as part of her Fulbright Scholarship. The United Methodist Church operates the mission.

Being close to him and watching him go through the whole process (of dying), she explains, was what got me thinking about how I could do something to help these kids. She says it was through that experience and the courses she took at Baldwin-Wallace, such as a sociology class titled Death and Dying, that led her to know she wanted to work with dying or grieving children.

As a Fulbright scholar, Chilcote will focus her study on the use of art as a therapeutic intervention when dealing with the emotional well-being of AIDS orphans. By 2005, Zimbabwe will be home to 900,000 AIDS orphans who will be impoverished, neglected and possibly ostracized from the community, according to estimates.

The U.S. Student Program is designed to give recent college graduates, masters and doctoral candidates, and young professionals and artists opportunities for personal development and international experience, according to the Fulbright Web site. Along with opportunities for intellectual, professional and artistic growth, the program aims to promote cross-cultural interaction and mutual understanding on a person-to-person basis.

The opportunity in Zimbabwe combines everything Chilcote loves: children, art, psychology and Zimbabwe. I see this as a starting point for my whole life in terms of the future and what I want to do. Personally and academically, its all the things I want to do. My passion is working with these kids, she said. The research is the path I can take to help them. Everything Im doing is focused on helping these kids.