Monday, April 07, 2008
By Terri Jo Ryan
Tribune-Herald staff writer
Kristin Elizabeth Elliott, 18, who hopes to enter Baylor University this fall, goes to church each week in a movie theater. Her own melodramatic life story could make the screenplay someday for an inspirational film to be shown there.
Kristin, a senior at Faith West Academy in Katy, Texas, has been battling a rare form of cancer for more than two years, a disease with only a 50 percent survival rate after five years.
Yet when she was asked last July by the Make-A-Wish Foundation what she hoped for, she requested not a celebrity visit for herself nor a fantasy vacation for her family but to share her wish with others.
She thought back on an earlier trip with Family Legacy Missions International to Zambia, a journey with her sister, Mandy Michelle Elliott, a 20-year-old Baylor junior. There, they spent days at Camp Life outside the city of Lusaka, working among the children orphaned by AIDS.
According to AVERT, an international AIDS charity, Zambia in southern Africa has one of the world’s most devastating HIV and AIDS epidemics. One in every six adults in Zambia is living with HIV, and life expectancy at birth has fallen to less than 40 years.
“God placed it on my heart to leave something for these kids,” Kristin said.
So she requested that Make-A-Wish help her start Kristin’s Miracle House, a home for 20 of the more than 1 million children orphaned in the poverty-stricken African nation by this modern scourge. The home would be part of a village established to give educational opportunities and medical attention to the ostracized children.
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WOW, what Faith!
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