Summer Solace

Occasionally the most unlikely pairings produce the most positive results -- such as  Afghan kids taking refuge at a North Carolina summer camp.

Formerly known as Lake Norman Children's Relief, Solace for the Children is a nonprofit focused on providing medical and dental attention to children in need.  In 1996, Dick Wilson and his wife, Patsy, began bringing children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to the US for medical treatment. As their services were needed less and less, they turned their attention to the children of war-torn Afghanistan.

And while Solace for the Children fosters life-changing physical repair, it also provides a safe haven for another kind of healing -- peace. There are the more obvious relationships built around the otherwise unlikely exchange between the Afghan and Americans, but what the Wilsons didn't expect to see, was the mending that's taken place among the Afghans themselves.

"When they got here we witnessed a phenomenon that took us by surprise. We learned that many of the children were from warring tribes," said Patsy Wilson tells the Associated Press. "They wouldn't have been speaking to each other at all in Afghanistan." In turn the children decided to drop any part of their names that might incite derision. Its been a successful practice ever since.

And what do the Americans get from all this? Perspective, or so says Carole McCay, the host mother to Zaman Rashid, who first came to America to have a tumor removed from his sinus cavity.  The 17-year-old describes the life in Farah as something "between life and death." As Rashid learns more and more each day, he hopes that after a US college education, he can return to his native home and really make a difference.

Just as their slogan promises, the Wilsons are indeed changing lives one child at a time.