Love rescues the lost
O.C. couple's charity organization provides shelter, care and a middle-class
lifestyle for AIDS orphans in South Africa.
HOMES FOUND: Ryan Audagnotti, wife Gerda and daughter Melissa of San Juan
Capistrano show photos of AIDS babies they’ve sheltered at their South
African orphanage. Both have since been adopted.
EUGENE GARCIA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By JIM HINCH
The Orange County Register
SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO – Gerda Audagnotti ushers a guest into what she calls
the war room and gestures at an antique South African chair, an heirloom from
her husband's side of the family. French-manicured toenails peek out from sandals
as she plops down in front of her computer. She calls up a Web site and flashes
a look of anguish.
"
Look at that beautiful baby!" she exclaims, pointing at a South African
AIDS victim she will probably never see, never get to usher into the network
of Johannesburg orphanages she founded five years ago and now runs from a quiet
house a stone's throw from Trabuco Creek.
Working three phone lines in a home office with a view of the garden, Audagnotti
and her husband, Ryan, oversee one of South Africa's most unusual, and increasingly
famous, responses to the AIDS crisis: four homes in a gated Johannesburg
suburb where volunteers nurture AIDS babies abandoned in roadside ditches
and dumped
in pit toilets.
Since the Audagnottis started Acres of Love in the house they built shortly
after they were married, the operation has grown to four homes where about
250 children have received free medication, round-the-clock care and immersion
in a South African middle-class lifestyle they otherwise would never know.
Now that the couple live in Orange County, where Ryan opened a subsidiary
of his consulting business a few years ago, neighbors here are getting involved.
Friends have held fund-raisers on nearby estates and a group of volunteers
from a San Clemente church plans to fly to Johannesburg this spring.
On Monday, Melissa Herrmann, a 22 year-old graduate of Vanguard University
in Costa Mesa, leaves for a six-week training internship running a recently
opened fourth house for eight school- age boys. Next year, she plans to become
operations director of a new network of homes the Audagnottis are buying
near Johannesburg townships where AIDS takes its heaviest toll.
The children cared for at Acres of Love are an almost invisible fraction
of the 3 million AIDS orphans experts expect in South Africa by the end of
this
decade.But the Audagnottis, who are Christians, said God told them: " 'It's
not about the number, it's how to look at each child,'" said Gerda Audagnotti. "We
have to do as much for the one as for the 99. ... We feel we are the body
of Christ in action."
More than 20 percent of South Africa's population of 44 million is infected
with HIV, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations coordinating agency for
AIDS relief. Earlier this month, in a radical change of course, the country's
government
vowed to more than triple AIDS spending to $1.7 billion over the next three
years and provide free medication. Previously, officials disparaged AIDS-fighting
drugs and questioned whether HIV caused AIDS.
Gerda Audagnotti said AIDS carries a heavy stigma in South Africa. Infected
spouses and children are routinely abandoned or shunned by their communities.
Some churches set up deposit boxes where parents dump children they are too
poor, sick or unwilling to care for.
The country's lingering racial divisions complicate relief efforts.
After the fall of the apartheid government in the early 1990s, white South
Africans, fearing crime, retreated from sections of Johannesburg into gated
suburbs to the north, said Ryan Audagnotti. Few still dare to venture into
townships where AIDS is prevalent.
Gerda said that by bringing babies into white communities, Acres of Love
provides a place where neighbors feel comfortable helping.
The social mix at the houses breaks down stereotypes on both sides - especially
the notion that AIDS babies are doomed to die and thus unworthy of attention,
Gerda said. Babies from some of the country's poorest and most ravaged communities
are nurtured by a multiethnic, international cadre of doctors, caregivers
and volunteers.
"
Women in the community are wives of CEOs," said Ryan Audagnotti. "They
tell their friends and parents at schools."
The message is also being spread in ways greater than word-of-mouth.
A PBS documentarian, in Africa to report on child rape, happened on Acres
of Love, grew attached to one of the children and changed course to make
a film
about the operation.The South African subsidiary of Grey Worldwide, a multinational
advertising firm, is preparing a TV commercial featuring Acres of Love that
seeks to
convince South Africans that AIDS babies can survive and lead normal lives,
with proper
care. And Ryan Audagnotti has traveled to Washington, D.C., to coordinate
efforts with U.S. officials.
Gerda's recollection of why she started Acres of Love touches on South
Africa's charged racial history.
She said she remembers watching black laborers working her grandparents'
farm. Memories of mothers holding their children flashed in her mind each
time she
read headlines about abandoned babies in AIDS-ravaged communities.
In 1998, she read a book about a man who started a hospital in his home. "I
said, 'Why don't we do this?'" she recalled. So she got a permit from
the government, and relief agencies began bringing abandoned babies to
the house she and Ryan built in 1983, shortly after they were married.
The family had moved into a larger home nearby, but had kept the old house
as a rental. They put in an institutional kitchen, hired caregivers and
began coordinating treatment for malnourished, infected children.
Now, a network of local private hospitals and clinics provides free checkups.
Doctors and nurses supervise drug regimens. And the children are fixtures
in local schools. The couple bought a second home when the first became
crowded. Then, with an increasing flow of donations from South African corporations
and American
churches,
they bought two more houses. At first, they worried that neighbors would
object to orphanages proliferating down the block. Instead, community members
came with donations to the houses,
which are immaculately maintained by professional gardeners.
"
We wanted home-based care so we could give the best care, what we would give
our own kids," Ryan Audagnotti said. Part of the couple's mission
is breaking what they call South Africa's cycle of poverty by raising
children in middle-class
communities with middle-class amenities, Gerda said. Previously, South
African officials resisted help from international aid agencies, citing
a desire to find what leaders called "African solutions" to
the nation's problems.
Though Ryan acknowledged that he and Gerda ensure their employees "are
of like faith," and seek to lift orphans from the impoverished lifestyles
of township communities, he said Acres of Love steers clear of South
African politics. The orphanage is registered in Johannesburg as a non-governmental
organization
and abides by the government's preference for reuniting orphans with
located relatives.
On Tuesday, Gerda was near-frantic at news that a 2-year-old HIV-positive
girl, found abandoned shortly after birth in a pit toilet, was likely
to be sent
back to a township to live with her grandmother. "
Can they really give her the medication? Do they have fridges (to store medicine)?
Will they be able to keep her alive as we can?" Gerda fretted. "You
don't know if (the family wants the child) because they're going to get
a (government) grant. ... She'll pass away and they'll say it's because
she
has AIDS. ...
" Sometimes I lie awake at night. How can people do ordinary things when
this is happening? But that's when God's putting passion in your heart to help
these
kids."
------------------------------------------------------------------------