About 2,000 UW-Madison students and staff will wear orange orphan"" T-shirts Tuesday as part of a campus-wide ""Orphan Campaign"" hosted by UW-Madison student group Athletes in Action.
The goal of the campaign is to spread awareness of the impact AIDS is having on sub-Saharan Africa, where one out of every 20 children is orphaned as a result of AIDS. Athletes in Action hopes to visually demonstrate the AIDS statistic by having 5 percent of UW-Madison's campus wear bright orange.
""Our goal is to saturate the campus with these shirts to raise the awareness and give students and faculty an opportunity to take the next step,"" UW-Madison senior and Orphan Campaign co-chair Tyler Turner said.
Fellow campaign co-chair and former UW-Madison football player Luke Swan hopes the campaign will help put the issue of AIDS on ""the forefront of people's minds.""
""People who know about it can do something about it. If they don't know about it, they can't do anything about it,"" Swan said. ""Our goal is just to really make something happen with this pandemic that is going on.""
For the past three years, Athletes in Action has raised money to build clean water wells in parts of Africa heavily affected by AIDS with its ""48 Hour Practice"" event, which has been postponed to fall.
The campaign originated from Acting On Aids, a movement to create awareness about AIDS globally. UW-Madison and Ohio State University are the first large public universities participating in the campaign.
Athletes in Action will try to get 4,000 students to wear the orange T-shirts Friday to represent the statistic projected if nothing changes in the next 10 years - one in 10 children will be orphaned due to AIDS. For all students wearing the T-shirts, there will be a five-minute ""swarm"" on Bascom Hill.
""We hear numbers all the time, but the numbers
don't always mean that much to us, so this is a visual representation,"" Scott Mottice, chair of Athletes in Action, said. ""Getting one in 20 students on this campus to wear an orange shirt that says 'orphan' on it kind of gives people a picture of how much that actually is.""
