Camp gives heart to kids with AIDS.

• Author: Cramer, Katherine
• Position: Camp Heartland

"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...