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Group helps in Ghana's AIDS fight
October 20, 2007
By Tenisha Waldo (Contact)
The Post and Courier
Sunday, October 21, 2007
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Afi Mensah dances during a ceremony at Fort Moultrie to honor slaves who were brought to South Carolina during the pre-Civil War slave era from a village in Ghana. Mensha plays as part of Nkabom, group of artists and craftspeople from Ghana who are raising help and awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa by joining with help from the Lowcountry. |
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Samuel Yeboah sings as a circle of participants clap to the time during a ceremony at Fort Moultrie to honor slaves who were brought to South Carolina during the pre-Civil War slave era from a village in Ghana. Yeboah is part of Nkabom, a group of artists and craftspeople from Ghana who are raising help and awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa by joining with help from the Lowcountry. |
Samuel Nkrumah Yeboah of Okurase, Ghana, saw his childhood friend lose her life to AIDS when she was in her 20s. He said she had no money and no avenue to cultivate her talents, so she used her body to make a living.
"This was somebody that I really trusted," he said Saturday after a remembrance ceremony at Fort Moultrie for enslaved Africans who were brought here long ago. The ceremony was one of many events the members of the African artist troupe Nkabom, which Yeboah directs, are participating in while they are in town raising money for a new educational center in Ghana. town raising money for a new educational center in Ghana.
Nkabom is partnering with the Gethsemani Circle of Friends, a nonprofit group in North Charleston, and the Family Services Research Center at the Medical University of South Carolina to raise funds for the center.
Yeboah, whose nickname in Ghana is "Powerful," is the visionary behind the undertaking, called Project OKURASE. From his standpoint, if his friend and thousands of other impoverished African children and young women had somewhere to go to be educated and empowered, they would be much better off.
Organizers hope a village center would enlighten girls and young women to make healthier choices, and it would be a place where they could learn job skills and build self-esteem.
They also hope the center would help combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic that has devastated Africa ��" particularly in the sub-Saharan region where the disease is most prevalent, an area that includes Ghana. The World Health Organization reported that in 2005, nearly 26 million people in that region were living with HIV.
In 2003, approximately 350,000 Ghanaians had the disease. An estimated 30,000 died from it that year, according to data compiled by the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
An alarming number of children in Ghana have been affected by AIDS; about 170,000 kids were left orphaned by the disease in 2003, the foundation says.
Yeboah said those orphaned children would especially benefit from the planned center.
"When they get a certain age, especially with girls, they don't have direction ... so they go on the streets and try to make a life for themselves," he said. "The center would be very beneficial, because it would give them a focus and give them something to do."
The center would be located in Okurase and would be named after the Nkabom troupe. There would be 14 buildings, including a school and housing.
Cynthia Swenson, a key organizer who is an MUSC psychologist and associate director of the school's Family Services Research Center, said the facility will cost about $1 million to build.
"We have bought the land, and it has been blessed by the chief of the village," she said.
Grants and donations would fund the first three years of operation, and then Nkabom would sustain the center.
Swenson helps coordinate a youth program called Djole Dance and Drum Company, which was founded in 1999 through a partnership among MUSC, North Charleston and the Union Heights neighborhood to help keep at-risk children off the streets. Djole is also sponsored by Gethsemani.
The Charleston fundraising effort launched after Djole ordered instruments from Africa, and Yeboah, who makes drums, encouraged the dance group to visit.
A group of students from Djole and their chaperones traveled to Ghana last summer and saw firsthand how the disease has ravaged many lives.
Dyshell Williams, 16, left a hospital crying after they visited ailing children. "I did get upset, because they were really, really sick," she said.
While in Africa, the students learned to use artistic talents to relay messages about prevention.
On Saturday, after the remembrance ceremony at Fort Moultrie, Djole students sang along with the Nkabom crew while they performed.
They were connected. By the music. By the dancing. By the purpose.
Reach Tenisha Waldo at twaldo@postandcourier.com or (843) 937-5744.
