Tammy Fisher
Director of Public Relations
La Sierra University
Riverside, California
909-785-2016 voice
tfisher@lasierra.edu
April 30, 2003

Riverside, CA - For the past decade La Sierra University (4700 Pierce Street, Riverside) students and friends have distributed hand made quilts to AIDS infants and other displaced children in venues ranging from Catholic AIDS hospices on Brazil's Amazon River to Obstetrics wards in Thailand prisons to South Africa homelands in concert with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

At the May 1 University Worship (11:00 AM in the La Sierra University Church-4937 Sierra Vista Avenue, Riverside) students will be greeted with a display of dozens of such quilts and will be informed of the next "quilt drop." La Sierra senior religious studies major Vaughn Nelson will be taking quilts to a village in rural Kenya built by and for AIDS mothers and their children plus AIDS orphans.

"Concerned citizens in rural Kenya have gone against local mores and customs which require 'unattached' widows and their children to become 'attached' before they can have a house to live in," notes Nelson. "This is but one of many grass roots responses to the AIDS epidemic in which thatched huts are constructed for AIDS widows and orphans and villagers are taught such self-sufficiency skills as agriculture and sewing. My goals are to live in this village, to do manual labor, to listen, to learn, and to return to this campus and share the story of brothers and sisters on the other side of the globe."

Affectionately dubbed "Global Piecemaking" by the press, this project was launched in 1992 with a call for 1,000 quilts for AIDS babies in Africa. The center was subsequently swamped by receiving no less than 17,000 quilts to date.

"This project is one way in which a campus of Southern California students occupied with 'getting degrees' and 'preparing for careers' can be reminded that they are a part of larger world and to recognize that irrespective of their professional vocations they have responsibilities to impact that world," noted Charles Teel, Director of the campus-based Stahl Center for World Service which sponsors the quilting project at La Sierra University.

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