Following in italics is a statement released by Congressional candidate Benjamin Lodmell (AL-1)
This is the Democrat running against incumbent Jo Bonner. Damn, he deserves to win! This is a decent caring family man who is dead right on all the most important issues – not as rabidly liberal as I am, but then someone like me could never get elected to anything in Alabama. I hope people reading this will be moved to show some support for Lodmell.
MOBILE, November 26, 2007 – Mobile resident Ben Lodmell, co-founder and executive director of World Children’s Relief & Volunteer Organization, 501c3, today announced the opening of the first public library built by the charity in Les Cayes, a remote rural area in the southwestern region of Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere.
“The library is a simple building, which will open December 1, took 18 months to build at a cost of $35,000, using local volunteer labor and donated books,” Lodmell said.
In addition to attending the library’s opening ceremony, Lodmell said he would be bringing a team of volunteer dentists and other health care professionals to Les Cayes where they will spend a week providing about $50,000 in free dental services at the Community Center created by the charity to help feed neighborhood children.
“Since its start-up in 2002, WCR has either built or rehabilitated 16 schools in some of the most remote and destitute areas in the world,” Lodmell said, “including nine in Haiti. We have also trained 173 teachers who serve as rural ‘trainers of trainers’ and helped sponsor the education of about 4,500 children in sub-Saharan Africa as well as provided more than 10,000 school uniforms. Our food programs feed nearly 1,000 children a day and those programs are growing. I can’t even count all the healthcare missions.” The total cost has been about $1,500,000 from public contributions.
World Children’s Relief is a non-profit charity founded by the Lodmell family. Its purpose is to foster justice, dignity and social development among the world’s neediest children. “Our goal is to give real hope through education to at least some of the 130 million children in the world who have never seen the inside of a school by establishing a network of them wherever the need is greatest,” Lodmell said.