There is a place in the rural grasslands outside of Johannesburg, South Africa that stands on the frontlines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic worldwide. The place is called “Botshabelo” (pronounced boh-tscha-BELL-oh), and it serves as a struggling oasis of love and support for mostly children and young people who have nowhere else to go.

Botshabelo is, first, an orphanage that is a home to more than 250 South African children, many of whom are so-called “AIDS orphans” that have lost the adults in their families to HIV/AIDS. Some of the children themselves at Botshabelo are living with HIV/AIDS, including some who contracted the disease after being raped by HIV-infected adults. These are children coping with sexual trauma at its worst.

The children of Botshabelo are also the focus of a superb documentary film, Angels in the Dust, released in 2008.

South Africa today is the country with reportedly the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world. More than five million South Africans are estimated to be living with the disease, and more than one million AIDS orphans are the most obvious result of the disease’s devastation of the traditionally close African family unit in South Africa.

In addition to being an orphanage, Botshabelo (also known as Boikarabelo) also has a school that educates about 280 African children, some of whom live at the orphanage and some of whom are from the surrounding villages — children, in other words, who have fallen through the cracks and are not being reached by South Africa’s great strides in education since the end of the apartheid racial segregation system in the 1990s.

This is an appeal for your support of Botshabelo, which has been struggling to keep itself afloat financially ever since its humble beginnings 23 years ago. The founders of Botshabelo — Marion Cloete and Con Cloete, a South African couple — have an open-door policy of not turning away any child or adult in need, and that has kept them struggling for financial support on a daily basis. Botshabelo gets no support from the South African government; it depends on contributions and donations from the public.

For me, the children of Botshabelo themselves are the real reason for wanting to help in any way I can: These are South African children who are dealing on a personal level with adult problems like death, poverty, rape, incest, prostitution and horrific sexual violence, and coming to terms with those problems the best ways they can. For those of us who come from a dysfunctional family environment anywhere in the world, you know the depth of the problem I’m talking about here.

That the children are finding ways to somehow cope with these adult problems is due mainly to the love and support of Botshabelo co-founder Marion Cloete, and the nurturing, understanding and counseling she gives these young people.

U.S. filmmaker Louise Hogarth, who lives in South Africa, deserves much credit for bringing these children’s stories to the screen in Angels in the Dust. This film is so good that I’m surprised it has not won more awards or been shown more widely in many more countries. It is truly one of the best films about South Africa I have ever seen — a film full of heartbreak, to be sure, but also full of hope for the children of the “Rainbow Nation”, as South Africa has been called since the end of apartheid.

But this is not a movie review — it is an appeal for your support. What can you do to support children on the frontlines of the world’s HIV/AIDS epidemic? Several things:

• Find out more: You can find out what Botshabelo is all about by taking some time to check out the official Botshabelo website. Here you will find out how the Botshabelo community was all started, how it works, what life is like there every day — and most importantly, how you can help make a difference in children’s lives there.

• Watch the film: I would highly recommend buying the DVD of the film Angels in the Dust directly from the filmmaker’s website or from your favorite online store. Through the film, you will get to know the children of Botshabelo, their stories, their lives and their country’s struggle with HIV/AIDS. There are lots of DVD “extras” that make this well worth the purchase. (It’s an all-region DVD, so it plays in all DVD players, including here in Japan.)

• Support a campaign: For those who are interested, I would encourage you to support the “Do Ubuntu” campaign by the film’s director, Louise Hogarth, to help HIV/AIDS victims in South Africa and give work to mothers who are struggling with the disease. You can get more information at Hogarth’s Do Ubuntu website here.

• Help out: Most importantly, you can help the children of Botshabelo by contributing what you can directly through the official Botshabelo website (listed above).

So why donate to help the children of Botshabelo in South Africa, when there are so many other problems in the world to worry about? I can think of no better reason than the one Marion Cloete gives in the film: “They are our children. They are mine, they are yours, they belong to all of us. We are all going to have to come together as men and women, and say we are the parents.”

Yes, these are all of our children — wherever they happen to be in the world. They are the future of our societies and our planet. I will personally be doing what I can to help the children of Botshabelo, a struggling oasis of love and support on the southern tip of Africa. I hope you will join me in doing so as well.