Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Love in Action: Simply Teresa
A mother of 4, a nurse, a missionary, and the medical director for Children’s Cup in Africa. Compassionate, generous, loving, fun, intelligent, strong, humble, courageous. So many ways to attempt to describe a woman who seems to be all things to everyone she meets. 
Teresa Rehmeyer lived a comfortable, and what most would call successful, life in Louisiana with her husband and 4 children. Contentment would seem obvious but not for Teresa and her family.
They knew there was more and in 2005 they made the change of a lifetime. Teresa and her husband moved their family to Swaziland in the south eastern part of Africa to serve orphaned and vulnerable children.
Teresa now runs a clinic, providing medical care to the 4000 children currently involved in Children’s Cup Care Points throughout Swaziland and Mozambique. Teresa cares for children with everything from fevers to cuts and wounds to complications of HIV/AIDS to severe physical and sexual abuse. 
She does home visits in the poverty stricken areas where the children live. She visits the children when they are hospitalized to follow their care, providing them with a familiar face, support, and love in the dirty and frightening institutions.
Abuse, violence, disease, neglect, and death are rampant here. Teresa values and loves the children when their own families, their own communities, and their own society do not. The children look to her to relieve their pain and suffering. The children look to her for healing and for hope. She is their light in a dark world and she always provides.
Lara Logan: The Real Lara Croft?
Meet award-winning journalist Lara Logan, who has been reporting from war zones for the past 15 years. Fictional woman Lara Croft intentionally puts herself in dangerous situations to save the world. Real woman Lara Logan also puts herself in dangerous situations, but to share the world, not to save it. That is until she and soldiers with the 82nd Airborne literally stumbled upon an orphanage in Iraq. They just happened to peer over a wall. What they saw on the other side was like nothing they had previously seen during their time in Iraq. Lara was determined to share the horrific conditions of an orphanage for boys with special needs and their rescue by these soldiers. So how does Lara Live in Love? Through her dedication to the truth - in war, danger, terror, and the hope that exists and persists in the midst of it all.
Lara was named one of Glamour Magazines 2007 Women of the Year. The publication's article is below.
The Truth Teller
Lara Logan, war correspondent
“When we both covered the war between Israel and Hezbollah, I’d get to the scene of an attack, and invariably Lara would already be there. ‘What took you so long?’ she’d ask.” —Anderson Cooper, anchor of Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN and host of Planet in Peril, just out on DVD
By Susan Dominus
Lara Logan, war correspondent
“When we both covered the war between Israel and Hezbollah, I’d get to the scene of an attack, and invariably Lara would already be there. ‘What took you so long?’ she’d ask.” —Anderson Cooper, anchor of Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN and host of Planet in Peril, just out on DVD
By Susan Dominus
Pinned down during an attack by insurgents in Ramadi, Iraq, Lara Logan asked herself two questions as bullets whizzed by her head: “Where can I get the best pictures?” and “Where can I stay alive?” Logan, 36, chief foreign correspondent for CBS News, has been having those thoughts—in that order—ever since she was a 17-year-old reporter in her native South Africa. On the job, she’s dodged gunfire everywhere from Angola to Afghanistan and in 2003 covered the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where she’s been almost nonstop ever since, even as the number of foreign reporters there has dwindled.
A bundle of energy who gets by on “three or four hours of sleep a night,” Snickers and Red Bull, Logan is fueled by one urgent mission: to tell it like it is. “If journalists weren’t in Iraq, any politician could say what he liked and no one would be the wiser,” she says. During the past year, the deadliest since the invasion, she saved children’s lives with her expose of horrific abuse at an Iraqi orphanage. “Lara shoots video herself when she doesn’t want to put the crew at risk,” says CBS anchor Katie Couric. Says Logan: “How can you show people reality if you don’t go see it yourself?” Bearing personal witness to “the cruel reality” of war is, she says, “what I was put on earth to do.”
For Lara’s reports and photographs about the children and their rescue soldiers, follow this link, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/18/notebook/main2946477.shtml
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Love in Action: La'Salette, Superwoman
She may not be faster than a speeding bullet nor be able to leap a tall building in a single bound, but La'Salette Duarte is a super woman. Portuguese by birth, La'Salette has lived in Swaziland for more than 25 years. She can not contain the love, joy, and hope that is within her so it naturally overflows to those around her. It is contagious. La'Salette currently runs the Children’s Cup Care Point in Mapa Veni in Swaziland. Although this care point is relatively new, there are already 250 children from the surrounding communities who come here every day for a meal, often their only meal.
In addition to the care point, La'Salette continues to lead the church and school she started many years ago in the same community. This region is 1 of the most devastated areas in Swaziland. (On a recent medical mission trip, the physicians, highly experienced with health care in rural and underdeveloped areas, said the children and adults were much more sick than other areas of Swaziland.) The church is located in an old machine shed on the edge of the sugar cane fields. La'Salette has been converting it into a church and school complete with 4 small classrooms and a teen room where the teens in the community can spend time, find refuge, experience comfort, compassion, and love, and know they are not alone. La'Salette adds her own personal touch throughout the building, ensuring that what some may consider “minor” or “unnecessary” details are present. These include pretty decorations in the women’s bathroom, murals on the walls of the school, a fountain, and brightly painted wheelbarrows with colorful flowers planted inside. La'Salette knows that love, to Live in Love, is in the details. La'Salette will keep going, keep growing the care and services she provides and supports.
In addition to the care point, La'Salette continues to lead the church and school she started many years ago in the same community. This region is 1 of the most devastated areas in Swaziland. (On a recent medical mission trip, the physicians, highly experienced with health care in rural and underdeveloped areas, said the children and adults were much more sick than other areas of Swaziland.) The church is located in an old machine shed on the edge of the sugar cane fields. La'Salette has been converting it into a church and school complete with 4 small classrooms and a teen room where the teens in the community can spend time, find refuge, experience comfort, compassion, and love, and know they are not alone. La'Salette adds her own personal touch throughout the building, ensuring that what some may consider “minor” or “unnecessary” details are present. These include pretty decorations in the women’s bathroom, murals on the walls of the school, a fountain, and brightly painted wheelbarrows with colorful flowers planted inside. La'Salette knows that love, to Live in Love, is in the details. La'Salette will keep going, keep growing the care and services she provides and supports.
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