
The next stop on my journey is Cambodia. I will be as a participant in the Buds to Blossoms Pediatric Massage Volunteer Program which will take me to Cambodia. There I and my fellow volunteers will live at a rural AIDS orphanage for two weeks providing gentle massage to over two hundred children with HIV to foster their health, well-being and development. A number of the children we will care for at the AIDS orphanage were abused, raped and enslaved before arriving there. The children's immune systems are severely compromised, and some have infections which cause painful, disfiguring sores to erupt on their skin. Only a narrow range of treatments for HIV are available in Cambodia, and the children are in danger of developing full-blown AIDS at any time. Newly-orphaned children come into the care of the orphanage on a regular basis and are sometimes emaciated and in the last stage of AIDS. Our volunteer group will promote the children's health and their chances of surviving HIV infection by providing them with the proven immune system-strengthening effect of gentle massage. The massages we give will also help relieve the children's pain and anxiety and meet their emotional needs for nurturing contact with caring adults.