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While on a retreat the summer of 2002, eleven senior students from Wheaton Academy, a Christian high school in Chicago’s suburbs, prayed together and asked the Lord to give them a God-sized idea to pursue. On a November evening, they discovered their mission: They would raise money to build a three-room schoolhouse in AIDS-ravaged Zambia through World Vision’s One Life Revolution program—a grass-roots youth movement to combat HIV/AIDS.

Christy Peed, one of the eleven students, was raised in Zambia and commented on the venture: "When this Zambia project was first introduced to our team, I was so excited. Here was an opportunity for my high school to be involved with 'my country.' From the time I was born until I was twelve years old, I lived in Zambia and considered it my home. Speaking from personal experience, this country and these people need our help. The education of children is essential to break the cycle of certain customs and aspects of their culture that AIDS feeds on. The schoolhouse will not be put to waste. The children want to learn and need to learn. This country is dying."

The project certainly was a God-sized task for a high school: They would need to raise $53,000. "The project team wanted students to contribute and sacrifice themselves so they would feel real ownership and personally follow the Lord's command to get involved as student followers of Jesus," said Chip Huber, dean of spiritual and student life at Wheaton. To that end, the seniors came up with a list of 12 ideas on how students could personally sacrifice in order to raise money:

1. Don't buy a new dress for the Christmas banquet and donate the money you would have spent
2. Don't buy flowers for your date for Christmas banquet and give that money to the project
3. Come to the girls' video night later this winter
4. Come to the guys' video-game challenge night later this winter
5. Skip a lunch and donate that money
6. Eat at the cookout this spring where all proceeds will go to the project
7. Tell your parents and relatives not to buy you a Christmas present and instead give you money for this project.
8. Save the money you would spend on a weekend night out and give it to the project instead
9. Participate in the second annual 3-on-3 basketball tournament to be held later this year
10. Attend the music benefit night later this year
11. Collect your change for the next six months and donate it to the cause
12. Come up with your own creative way to gather resources for this eternally significant project

Every student was given a small bank shaped like a schoolhouse in order to collect spare change. Also, a replica model of the schoolhouse was built for students to deposit change from the vending machines.

Each of the four high-school classes, along with school teams and clubs, ran successful events at the school to raise money including a cookout, concert, candy sales, community car wash, X-box tournament, school play, and movie night.

Their efforts paid off. In an all-school assembly on May 20, a check for $72,000 was presented to World Vision to build the Kakalo Village Schoolhouse in Zambia.

Dean Huber says, "It has grown us, changed us, and caused us to live differently, and that is an amazing thing." Here are some comments from the students that headed this project:

		"My hope and prayer is that the next generation of children in Zambia will be able to grow up and be nurtured by both their parents without the threat of AIDS trying to destroy and take their lives."
		—Justine Dominguez
		"I have become passionate about this project, because many of the individuals suffering from this disease are helpless victims. Many of the victims have no resources to provide medical care and many, many children have been orphaned at a young age due to the AIDS pandemic. I've discovered that the real question is not 'What are these Zambian people going to do?' but rather 'What am I…What are we…What are you going to do?' in response to the needs of people impacted by AIDS."
		—Ryan Souders
		"I know that it is not coincidence that we have chosen to step out and do something real in response to the needs in Africa. It is my worst fear, however, that though God has blessed us with so much, we will look away and deliberately ignore the immense need that is so evident in Zambia. We must now let our desire to help out the people of Zambia erupt into an unstoppable source of income from which we can draw attention to the enormous needs in our world. We know what needs to be done and we have been chosen to complete this mission."
		—Karl Brorson
		"Granted, what we are doing is relatively small, just one schoolhouse in one village. But if we don't do something, I believe that we will be held accountable for the lives that we could have saved but instead stared blindly at. This project is necessary because we have a call to impact lives half way around the world. Thousands of people die every week because they don't know that they are infected with AIDS. We have the resources and the opportunity to make a difference so that an entire continent will not be lost."
		—Merry John