Final Post

With our project, we wanted to raise money to give to an organization to help fund HIV/AIDS research in Africa. We figure that this is an important issue because it is estimated that, in 2007, there were 33.2 million people worldwide who were living with AIDS, not to mention all those who died from it. When we were trying to decide what direction we wanted to go with our charity soccer tournament the people from our class put forward that we should give the money that we would hopefully raise toward something that affected Africa. Naturally, we automatically thought about AIDS since most researchers believe that it originated in sub-Saharan Africa during the twentieth century. It seems obvious that the people of the world needs to do something about the AIDS epidemic, which we are. There is just too much of a disparity in the AIDS epidemic between the "developed" world and "developing" world--96% of those affected in the world live in developing countries. These countries don't have enough resources or technology to adequately find a cure for this (to date, even the "developed" countries in the West have not found a cure). However, our country does have the resources to make an effort to find a cure. We also have money that we can afford to give to African countries so that they can provide prevention tools and materials (without a cure right now, the best option is prevention). Recently the U.S. government committed $15 billion to Africa over a period of five years. Even though we knew that the amount of money we raised would not be anywhere close to the U.S. government's amount, but, as the saying goes, "Every little bit helps." FHI, the organization that our money is going to, employs more than 1,800 people in more than 65 countries. So it goes without saying that they need as much financial help as they can get in order to continue their good work.