I do all the running. You get all the glory.

My Facebook friends have been reading about my running and training for free for three years now. It’s time for them to pitch in and pay for all that "whining" bragging I do. I promise they will burn 50 calories for every dollar they donate.


That’s an Oreo Cookie’s worth of calories right there!

But while I run around my pleasant suburban neighborhood counting off how many cookies I can eat, there are orphans in Africa who have lost at least one parent to HIV/AIDS and even, in some cases, been infected with the disease themselves.

Imagine as a child losing your parents and living in an orphanage in Africa. I bet you can’t.

Tanzania is a country on the east coast of Africa south of Kenya and bordering the troubled nations of Rwanda and Burundi. It is a place of great beauty. Tanzania is home to Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa and it is bordered by three of the largest lakes on the continent: Lake Victoria (the world's second-largest freshwater lake) in the north, Lake Tanganyika (the world's second deepest) in the west, and Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi) in the southwest.

It is also home to nearly a million of the world’s HIV/AIDS orphans. Orphans are often subjected to discrimination and have little or no chance for education. This leads to a lifetime of poverty as well as the very real likelihood of being forced into hard labor, prostitution, human trafficking and military service.

Let’s raise $500 this summer! My goal is to run 344 miles by the end of October. Do you think I can do it? Put some money on it! All the money raised (after PayPal takes their modest percentage) goes directly to the education of HIV/AIDS orphans in Tanzania. If you raise more than $500 by the end of October, I’ll run another 50 miles in November no matter what the weather is like and that’s saying something in IOWA!

I do all the running. You get all the glory.