In partnership with Advantage Africa, Castle Hill Baptist Church are supporting The Rescue Team for HIV/AIDS in Kalulini, Kenya, as part of our international outreach.

Advantage Africa provides encouragement, resources, advice and training as well as links to other sources of knowledge, skill and funds. It is a small charity with three staff and six trustees, including our own congregation member Alison Griffith.

The Rescue Team is a group of young people that work together to address the sickness, death and poverty caused by HIV/AIDS in the vicinity of Kalulini, Kenya.

The Team educate children and adults about the virus in schools, churches and marketplaces using entertaining and interactive drama, poetry, music and sport. The hold voluntary counselling and testing events, youth discussions and relationship therapy, support people living with AIDS and run training for village midwives.

In partnership with Advantage Africa, this group of creative people have achieved extraordinary things; they now reach up to a thousand people each month with their life-saving services.

Castle Hill Baptist Church are supporting the Rescue Team to expand their work by constructing a well-equiped resource centre where local people can access good quality information on HIV/AIDS and other health, social and moral issues they face - from each other, and through books, magazines and videos.

The resource centre will be a safe meeting place built to the standard of a government approved clinic for voluntary counselling and testing. it will enable the Team to expand their activites to reach even more people affected by, or vulnerable to, HIV.

The centre will be fully accessible to people with all kinds of disabilities - and one of the first 'disability friendly' HIV counselling and testing centres to be built in Africa.

The cost for the whole project is £34k including £18k for building and equiping the centre, £10k to fund the Team's services/outreach over the next year and £6k for Advantage Africa to support the Team with mentoring and training that will build their skills and capacity. Advantage Africa has already raised £9k and our church is providing to balance of £25k required for the work to take place.