AN Ellesmere woman has sold her home to enable her to pay to go to work with disadvantaged people in Pretoria, South Africa for the next two years.
Youth worker Ruth Holden, aged 37, whose parents Jim and Paula Holden live in Four Crosses, flies out to South Africa on September 7 to join a team from Operation Mobilisation, an international Christian charity which has more than 5,000 workers in 110 countries around the world and whose British HQ is at The Quinta, near Oswestry.
Ruth trained as a youth worker at Glyndwr University, Wrexham, and was full-time youth leader at Carreg Llwyd Church, Oswestry, for nine years before spending three years as children's and youth leader for the Hodnet Deanery.
It was in this role that she led a team of young people from Cheswardine to visit a church project they had sponsored in South Africa. She was so taken with the country and its people that she returned the following year on her own, working with a project to help street kids and those affected by AIDS. She has also helped at a children's school in Uganda.
To raise money for going to work in South Africa Ruth not only sold her home but organised a number of sponsored events including walking up 50 Welsh mountains over 2,000 ft high.
For the first six months in South Africa Ruth will be training with practical work in remote villages, and with street kids, prostitutes and those affected by AIDS. After training she hopes to become a leader in the OM team in South Africa.
Ruth said: "A conservative estimate is that 25 per cent of the population of South Africa are infected with HIV and there are more than one million AIDS orphans. Operations Mobilisation has launched AIDS Hope in South Africa to help some of these people and I hope to be part of that work."
A commissioning service for Ruth was held at Carreg Llwyd Church.