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When Kathie Watters lived in Cameroon and encountered first-hand the heartbreaking loss of seeing someone close to her die of AIDS, she realized that her skills as a registered nurse and a linguist put her in a unique position to help battle what is now the leading cause of death in Africa. As part of her work with Wycliffe Bible Translators, Watters helps bring local language AIDS education materials to communities where Wycliffe is also facilitating Bible translation.

In January 2005, motivated by the death of her friend and housekeeper, Watters led a team in implementing an AIDS education program using easily translatable booklets called Kande's Story. Now, Wycliffe's staff and the African translation teams translate the booklets into a community's own language—providing heart language AIDS education for the first time in most of these communities. Kande's Story materials are currently being developed or used in 11 countries and 80 language communities in Africa.

"After seeing people I cared about dying from this epidemic I wanted to do something," said Watters, developer of Wycliffe's AIDS program, co-author of the Kande's Story materials, and part of a three-generation Wycliffe family (Watters and her husband, John, worked in Cameroon and Kenya; her daughter and son-in-law serve in
Papua New Guinea; her father-in-law served in Peru and the United States). "Being part of a translation team and having a background in nursing, I believed Wycliffe could have an impact on AIDS in communities where language development was underway."

Wycliffe recently launched the Last Languages Campaign—a full-sprint effort to bring first-time access to literacy, life-saving health information, and the Bible to the remaining one-third of the world's language groups— some 200 million people—over the next 17 years, representing a time savings of 125 years from the late 20th- century translating pace. By reaching this goal and providing AIDS education materials in a community's heart language, Wycliffe hopes to enhance millions of lives around the globe.

Related link: Kande's Story (sample booklet in PDF format)