Camp gives heart to kids with AIDS.

"This one is for my heart," eight-year-old Nile Wolff explains as he holds up a small red robot he uses to defend his body. "And this one," he says, "is for my T-cells."

Nile Wolff is a regular boy fighting the uncommonly cruel disease of AIDS. Like many other kids his age, he loves meeting up with his best friend at summer camp.

Several years ago, camp was something Nile and his ten-year-old brother Sean could not experience. But then in 1991, they met Neil Willenson in their home town of Mequon, Wisconsin. At twenty, Willenson was already a veteran political activist; he had raised more than $8,000 to fight homelessness by organizing benefit rock concerts in Milwaukee and had won one-third of the vote as a Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin State Assembly at age eighteen, although he ran in an overwhelmingly Republican district. When he met the Wolff family, he had just finished reading aloud Ryan White's book about his struggle with AIDS to youngsters at a YMCA camp. Struck by the way AIDS was robbing the Wolff brothers of their family's finances and their chance for fun, Willenson started raising funds for a summer camp for kids with AIDS and their siblings. The next summer, Nile, Sean, and seventy-two other kids attended the first Camp Heartland for free.

Now, two years and $250,000 in private donations later, the charity is thriving. This summer, 250 kids who either have HIV or AIDS or whose families have been affected by the disease participated in week-long camps in New Jersey and Wisconsin. They came from more than thirty states to swim, boat, dance, watch fireworks, ride in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, meet famous sports figures, and enjoy the company of other kids and people who know the pain of a life touched by AIDS.

"Kids need a safe haven where they can go where they feel 100 per cent accepted," says Willenson, who donated to the camp the $25,000 Arthur Ashe Award he recently received for his work. "Coming to this camp means that for the first time many of these kids can openly discuss that they have AIDS. They can talk about it every second if they want. That's significant."

Willenson says the camp's mission to help siblings of kids with HIV is no less important. "Our responsibility is to give kids like Sean [who does not have HIV] a fun week and tell him he's not alone and has a place where he can get support. Sometimes those kids feel left out, because the child with AIDS is always the priority. This is an opportunity to have a very fun week like the kids with AIDS but perhaps openly discuss what it's like to live with a family member who has AIDS."

Underlying the organizing and fund-raising is a sense of urgency. Although an individual child has never been denied admission to the camp, agencies wanting to send hundreds of kids have been turned down. By next summer, Camp Heartland volunteers aim to raise $2 million to purchase a year-round camp and AIDS education center so they can embrace as many kids as possible while they are still alive.

Camp Heartland volunteers also work to educate others about the disease. "This disease, more than any other, is absolutely preventable," Willenson says. "AIDS education and awareness needs to be mandatory in every school. Children are not idiots. They need to know how the disease is transmitted. AIDS education should be ageappropriate, but it should start at kindergarten and be discussed over and over."

In October, Willenson and a group of ten kids with AIDS will embark on a Journey of Hope speaking tour through seventeen cities along the East Coast. "Kids with AIDS are often denied a voice," says Willenson. "But some of these kids have a voice and have been using it. We're leading a movement not for kids with AIDS, but of kids with AIDS."

Camp Heartland can be reached at [phone] or 4565 N. Green Bay Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53209.