A Leeds man is working to improve life in the AIDs-stricken nation
Jeff McNear will work with a nonprofit group that helps feed people around the world .
By Seth Golden
Special to the Sun Journal

LEEDS – Soon Jeff McNear will sojourn in South Africa as part of a fact-finding mission for a Maine-based humanitarian group.

“I want a better understanding of what their needs are and what their hopes and dreams are,” he said, adding that he wants to help distill those dreams into reality.

In May, McNear will be one of three from the South Africa Partnership to journey 8,000 miles to try to find ways to better assist their South African friends.

“Basically, what we’re doing is gathering facts,” McNear said. The partnership is a group of about 35 people from various Presbyterian churches in the state, such as Leeds Community Church, who have committed to helping two dozen churches and their people in South Africa.

There, the 47-year-old McNear will work with Heifer Project International, a nonprofit group that helps feed people around the world by supplying animals such as heifers, goats and chickens.

In Durban, South Africa, McNear and others will tour successful projects sparked by the nonprofit group. The partnership began in 1999 and McNear joined in 2001. He will also tour AIDS hospices during his trip and go to an orphanage.

He said he does not know how he will react to seeing orphaned HIV-positive children whose parents have been struck down by AIDS.

McNear will bring facts back to Maine which hopefully will help the humanitarian group find new ways “to help our brothers and sisters in South Africa.”

After apartheid ended, the government granted freedom to South Africans, but nothing else, McNear said. “No jobs,” he said. “No hope.”

He will spend four days in Macfarlan, a place where the partnership has focused its assistance.

“I am in hopes we can understand their culture a little better,” McNear said.

The partnership members have bought computers for their South African friends and e-mail them regularly, he said.

McNear will leave May 11 and return May 23.

In July, 16 young people from South Africa will come to Maine for two weeks as part of a youth exchange. Last year, McNear in a group of 16 went to South Africa. Heifer Project International helped the partnership start a poultry project in a village in South Africa.

“The idea was to increase the nutrition,” McNear said. By giving some families chickens, the hope was they would set aside some money from the sale of their eggs for other families to buy chickens, McNear said.

“Eventually, it would snowball,” he said, adding that the gift would just keep getting passed on.

Last year, the partnerhsip also helped put a roof on a South African church.

“It’s been a spiritual experience (in the past),” he said. “It was a very powerful experience. It feels like a calling right now.”