Story number 1 for 22 Jun 2001

(South Africa)–Headlining today news, South Africa’s population could literally be decimated if AIDS isn’t attacked by the church there. That’s the word from African Enterprise’s Michael Cassidy who’s appealing for your help. Cassidy describes the AIDS problem. “In the next 8-10 years we will lose 50-percent of all our young people under 15. We have about 150,000 orphans being produced a year. You have a situation where 20-percent of your workforce dead in the next 10 years. Apartheid undermined human dignity, but it didn’t kill a nation off, and that is what is going to happen now.” Cassidy says the only answer to this is a coordinated effort by the body of Christ. “No single denomination can manage this. This has to be a nationwide effort of the church of which 78-percent of the country professes to be nominally Christian. In order to get this process up and running between now and the end of the year we need between 25 and 30,000 U-S-A dollars.”