Africa (WCS) ― "Hope For Today's Generation" is a resource for teaching kids how to fight AIDS in their families and communities. Developed and field-tested by African educators, this curriculum will make an impact by reaching children as young as five years of age. Worldwide Christian Schools has partnered with teachers and administrators in Africa to fund "Hope for Today's Generation" and pay for its distribution to Christian schools across Africa.
PLUSNEWS out of Johannesburg, South Africa reports that the UN Children's Fund (Unicef) has urged the world to prioritize orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in the fight against HIV/AIDS. In a new report, "A Call to Action: Children, the Missing Face of AIDS," Unicef called for renewed energy in alleviating the plight of children and meeting the targets set in the UN Millenium Development Goals on AIDS, child mortality and maternal health for 2015.
"We call upon every part of the global society to join in a campaign to support national efforts to ensure that this is the last generation of children that must bear the burden of HIV/AIDS," the report said.
"WCS' partner schools across Africa are filled with orphans and vulnerable children," said Dale Dieleman, WCS field director for Africa. "In collaboration with the Reformed Church of East Africa (RCEA), we are not letting this United Nations plea go unheard. The church and Christian schools should be the first to act, leading the global charge against HIV-AIDS among children."
Five years ago, with the urging of the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee in Kenya, WCS funded the health and life-skills curriculum project written by RCEA teachers connected with Reformed Church of East Africa. Now in its first edition, each book contains more than 60 biblically-based lesson plans for teachers from first through eighth grade.
This year, an RCEA teachers' writing team is revising that edition with continued funding from WCS and with an expanded vision.
"We see this program as a global teaching tool for classrooms everywhere," said Dieleman. "With assistance from Christian Schools International, a curriculum team from North America will write a teacher's supplement of creative, interactive student activities based on the RCEA lesson plans. Then, a team of African educators residing in the USA will review the activities and contextualize them for the typical African classroom."
Together, this international effort will engage teachers globally, facing lifestyle and health issues head on with their students, in a setting of biblically-based patterns of Christian living beginning as early as Grade 1 for children everywhere.
"In many African countries, the law demands that HIV-infected children be told they have the disease as early as the time they enter their school years. Why keep them from the hope they have in Christ? HIV is not a death sentence for children who can access treatments," Dieleman explains. "And for children not infected, why shelter those not infected from the truth and about how to share Christ's compassion with those infected? This is why the ‘Hope For Today's Generation' curriculum is so aptly named." If you can help, click here.
