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3B LIFE/ tEjit C^arlone $oi:t Thursday June 30, 2005 Man helps African AIDS victims The Charlotte Post niE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON- Stephan Bekale left his home in Gabon with a teenager’s dreams of an American col lege education and a career in the sport he loved, basketball. But his pei*sonai game plan Hianged when his pai*ents, back home in their country on Africa’s west coast, died a few years later, just months apart. AIDS had stolen them both. \Mth giief as a coach, the 6- foot-9 foi'ward went on the offensive to spare others a similar fate. Bekale (pro nounced beh-CAH’-lay) set aside his di'eam of pro bas ketball stardom and created Hoops4Africa, to use the stai’ power of American hoopsters to spread the message of AIDS prevention to Afiica’s youth. ‘You can touch kids thinugh basketball,” the 26-year-old Alexandria, Va., resident said in an intei*view. Bekale should know. Not long ago, he was a teenager in Africa, wishing he could “be hke Mike”— Michael Jordan, the basket ball superstar. Now he spends his days and nights network- ing and raising money to fly 10 athletes, five each finm the National Basketball Association and Women’s National Basketball Association, to Kenya for a week in September to talk to schoolchildi’en of all ages about HIV/AIDS. Visits to AIDS orphanages also ai'e on the schedule. It won’t all be sober talk, thou^. Basketball clinics ai*e planned to teach the children how to shoot, dribble and maneuver on court for their own games, as well as sight seeing tiips. “Our main focus is to get the information out on AIDS and how deadly the virus is and our means of doing that is through basketball,” said Washington \Wzards foi*ward Michael Ruffin, one of the 10. “Hopefully by I’eaching the children theyll go home and talk to their parents a little bit and fell thefr pai'ents about it,” added Ruffin, a father of four. AIDS has had a devastat ing effect on sub-Sahai'an Afiica, where moi-e than half the world’s HIV-infected peo ple live. Millions in the region have died of the disease since the epidemic began, includ ing 2.3 million last year, according to United Nations statistics. Bekale was a lanky 15- yeai’-old when he landed in New York in 1995 after scrap ing together enough money for the plane tiip that would See EX-BASKETBALL/4B Too much water could be dangerous THE ASSOCIATED PRESS TUCSON, Ariz. - Sometime in the middle of the night, Carol liifls began to feel very strange. Dizzy, confused, disoriented. By midmoming, she had coUapsed into a chair, unable to walk, unaware of what day it was. She was, in fact, dying. The reason? She drank too much water. Ibo much water? In the Southern Arizona desert? Where the never-ending mantra drummed into our heads tells us to drink water constantly to ward off the perils of our extreme, dry heat? Well, Ibfts-always vigilant about her health-followed that advice for years, drink ing lots of water daily to stay hydrated and healthy And it almost killed her. “This was a tremendous suiprise to me. It’s a fascinat ing phenomenon,” said Thfis, 80, a lor^time TUcsonan and mother of the late Randy Tufts, co-discoverer of Kartchner Caverns. ‘1 just think people leally need to know there is such a thing as drinking too much wat«: -even here-and that it can be very dangerous. I think there were warning signs this was happening to me, but I had no idea what they meant.” Her warning is timely com ing on the heels of a major medical study of endurance Books stir discussion on loss of friendship THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CHICAGO—Friendships blow up and fade out all the time. Sometimes it’s a fight. And life changes — a move, a marriage, a baby — can get in the way Then there are those times when you just look at your fiiend and realize you don’t really have much in common anymore. Some believe losing a fiiend- ship is a particularly traumat ic event for women — a theo ry explored in a couple of recent books that have inspired wider discussion of a topic sometimes seen as taboo. Women “have an expecta tion that romantic love mi^t not last. But the idea is that fiiendship is made of much stronger stuff — that you’re fiiends forever,” says Ehssa SchappeU, co-editor and con tributor to the new book “The Friend Who (jot Away” a col lection of essays written by 20 women who lost fiiends for various reasons. “There’s almost no vocabulary for talk ing about it when it falls apart. That’s where the shame of it comes finm.” As SchappeU’s co-editor, Jenny Offill puts it, “the giddi ness and Golden Age of fiiend ship” sometimes doesn’t last. “It’s not always Ta-Ya Sisterhood’ or ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,”’ Offill says, i-eferrii^ to gal-pal nov els that have become popular movies. Nor is it usually the stereotypical “cat fight,” she says. Much more often, when women’s fiiendships end, the experience is far more subtle — and without resolution. Kimberly Eberl, a 27-year- old Chicagoan, still wonders why her college roommate dis appeared after coming out as a lesbian— something Eberl says she accepted easily ‘Tve tried calling her a million times just to say hello and see if we can reconnect,” Eberl says. “But she’s never answered any of my calls.” Candace Talmadge contin ues to feel the tug of her child hood fiiend Linda, with whom she slowly lost touch after Talmadge moved to England at age 14. “I don’t think Linda ever for gave me for moving. I think she felt abandoned,” says athletes that found diinking too much water duiing heavy prolonged exercise maybe an even gi’eater threat than drinking too little. In fact, that phenomenon has unexpectedly developed into one of the most common health threats to Grand Canyon hikers, where nearly a fifth were ending up as “water intoxication” emer gencies until signs went up Please see DRINKING/4B Ckarleston 1 louse on Tke plaza A Country Restaurant Where Everyday is a Holiday Lunch 11:30 a.ni. - 3:00 p.m. Dinner. 5:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.ni. 3128 The Plaza Charlotte, NC 28205 704-333-4441 Lots of good food and beverages We’ll feed’ you til we fill’ you up, fuh true! Parking available on premises and shuttle services off premises. Talmadge, now a 51-year-old author who now fives in Lancaster, Ifexas, and whose fiiend later died in an imi'e- lated suicide. “She’s still in my heart — very very much so ” In some cases, the damage done when fiiendship ends is so severe that some compare it to the end of a marriage. That was the case for Karen Ei^, who, five years ago, ended a relationship with a fiiend that she found too draining and dramatic. She wrote about it in another recent book of essays, which she edited, titled “Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women’s Friendships.” “I had a dream the olher night that I was wandering around with her,” Eng, who now fives in En^and, says of her former fiiend. “I was ter rified because I didn’t know if she’d read the book.” Eng says her husband- whom she describes as “a supersensitive, New Age guy’—did not at all under stand the importance she placed on this difficult fiiend ship. It’s not that he doesn’t have close fiiends of his own, she says. In fact, he has a core group of male fiiends he’s been dose to for years. “He loves those guys. He’s always happy to talk to and see them,” she says. “But nobody feels bad if one of them doesn’t call for a couple of years.” Offill, co-editor of “The Friend Who Got Away” jokes that a book of essays written by m^ who’ve lost fiiends might be titled “Oh Yeah, I Used Tb Know That Guy” She and SchappeU spoke with male writers, hoping some would write essays for their book. But, invariably they found that men’s breakups with fiiends was “very undra- matic,” Offill says, laughing. Since then, they have come across a few men* on their book tour who’ve wanted to share painful stories about a fiiend — a sign, some say that men simply grieve their losses differently “On the smface, it seems like what you lost wasn’t big — but it was,” says Yill Layman, a 44-year-old teacher who fives in Please see BOOK/4B Prices in this I ad good I JIJNt We reserve tbe right to limit quantities and correct AH Stores typographical and photographic errors. Accept
The Charlotte Post (Charlotte, N.C.)
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June 30, 2005, edition 1
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