Although today FACE AIDS involves many people from many different walks of life, it all began with one woman. Mama Katele, weighing in at less than 100 pounds and living in the most obscure and under-developed region of Zambia, was an unlikely candidate for the Western attention, but she became the face of AIDS for three American volunteers who spent their summer in the refugee camp where she lived.

Katie Bollbach, Jonny Dorsey, and Lauren Young went to Mama Katele’s refugee camp in the summer of 2005 to work through an organization called FORGE. For the past three years, FORGE has been helping university students from the US and Canada to implement self-designed projects in African refugee camps. Lauren, Jonny, and Katie had all arrived at Mwange with projects in different areas, including literacy, female empowerment, and orphan care.

The three students quickly realized that if you’re working in development in Zambia, you can’t ignore AIDS, and felt compelled to do something about HIV in the camp before they left. After a bit of investigation, they discovered that there were only 40 people in the camp who had tested positive for HIV and that only 5 people were tested for the disease each month. National statistics suggest that at least 1000 people in Mwange were living with HIV/AIDS. They also met Mama Katele, the only semi-open HIV+ person in the camp of 24,000 refugees, and began to work with her to convince more people to find out their HIV status.

Mama Katele put a face on AIDS in Africa for Katie, Jonny, and Lauren. She told them about her children and grandchildren, her divorce and village. She told them about the pain that kept her awake at night and the fatigue that forced her to sleep most of the day. She told them about her lost position working for the education commission in the camp and her desire to work again so she could supplement her diet, her only hope for keeping herself healthy without any access to ARVs.

The three students began planning a small income-generating project for Mama Katele that they hoped would encourage people to get tested for HIV and open up about their status. They decided that it would be possible for people like Mama Katele to sew the small beaded pins that they had seen worn by the HIV peer educators in the camp, but they soon realized that if they had only a small group of people working on pin production. Soon, they recognized that these pins as an amazing fundraising opportunity.

The idea for a student awareness and fundraising campaign was born in one afternoon when the students were sitting on the porch of their house in Zambia. They decided to expand the income-generating project to two other refugee camps and the surrounding communities to produce and sell a target of 50,000 beaded AIDS awareness pins at universities across the US. In a few hours, all three decided to stop out of school and Katie decided that she would stay in Zambia for another four months to set up AIDS support groups and coordinate production.

FACE AIDS began in a remote region of Zambia, but has since been brought back to the US into community service groups, university campuses, and board rooms.

Where will you take it next?