DC - A Work Free Drug Place

Washington, DC has the highest AIDS community in the nation, higher than some countries in Africa. The Health Department's HIV/AIDS Administration awarded more than $25 million from 2004 to 2008 to nonprofit agencies in the area which recently was discovered to be marked by questionable spending, a lack of clients, or lapses in record-keeping and care.

According to the Administration’s records, more than $1 million in AIDS money went to a housing group whose ailing boarders sometimes struggled without electricity, gas or food. A supervisor said she was ordered to create records for ghost employees.

About $400,000 was paid to a nonprofit organization, launched by a man who once ran one of the District's largest cocaine rings, for a promised job-training center that has never opened.

More than $500,000 was earmarked for a housing program whose executive director had a string of convictions for theft, drugs and forgery. After the D.C. Inspector General's Office could find no evidence that he was operating an AIDS nonprofit group, the city terminated the grant but never sought repayment.

A case like Paige, a 50 year old woman in DC, is rampant and spreading like an uncontrollable wildfire. She was a single mother who once threw birthday parties for her two daughters in her apartment in Southeast Washington, where she'd cook beef stew for elderly neighbors and always had bus fare for a friend. But AIDS and two bouts of pneumonia had left her weak, homeless and unable to care for herself. She came to a community non-profit group for help one night while drenched in the rain. Unable to secure help from the group who later was discovered to be corrupt and not actually providing any services, Paige died alone on a park bench. Ironically, she was only a mile away from the Health Department's HIV/AIDS Administration.

Twenty-five years ago, the District was on the forefront of the fight against the disease. City leaders created a government-funded AIDS office and began to pour tens of millions of dollars into a network of local groups that promised critical frontline support.

When I read the statistics, I was appalled and saddened. Yet, on the same note, I wasn’t really all that surprised. This is where our nation-our world really, is heading, the direction in which our fellow man is going. We give the Middle East money to rebuild their war torn country, and it ends up in the Taliban’s lap (an article I focused on not too long ago). We give school children education grants, and someone squanders it away. We have teachers having sex with students, and we have people desperate for attention-even negative publicity, telling the world their child is lost in a balloon. I’ve added some jokes to this article about that last one, but the primary focus of this article is anything but funny!

More than 20 failed to file tax returns or secure a city business license, The Washington Post found. Some groups submitted employee résumés and consulting contracts with false information, including fake addresses and credentials. Others had a history of financial problems or had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on travel or executive pay. One Northeast nonprofit group paid its executive director $357,000 in salary and benefits at a time when it was cutting back services.

In late 2006, the FBI quietly began investigating the city's AIDS program. An FBI supervisor said the investigation remains active.

Your heart aches to hear about the countless stories of those suffering from AIDS in our own nation’s capital.

“When mice crawled into his sister's crib or his mother started heaving on the worn stairwell to their fourth-floor apartment, 9-year-old Ja'Waun Edwards would reach for his drawing book. In the tiny spiral notebook, he had sketched his favorite things: helicopters and a picture of his father, Redskins players and SpongeBob SquarePants. He also drew a stick figure of a boy, grinning.

"That's just me," he said, "when I'm happy."

In his heat-choked bedroom in Northwest Washington in June, happiness was fleeting.

Ja'Waun was living with a mother with AIDS. He had spent long nights listening to her toss in bed, nauseated and dizzy. He'd bring her water, then settle in beside her and beg her not to cry. In the morning before school, he'd leave out her medicine for AIDS and asthma, conditions made worse by the long flight of stairs in a building with no elevator.

In June, the family was facing a new problem.

The church program that owned the apartment they had been staying in for 18 months had lost funding from the D.C. Health Department's HIV/AIDS Administration, leaving J'Mia Edwards and her three children with no place to live.

She was among hundreds of sick people searching for support and housing in a city with the nation's highest AIDS rate. “

Let’s get stupid media press about Balloon Boy hoaxes and saturated celebrity coverage of NoBama (that don’t pertain to his job) canned and focus on people who need help and those who have no voice!