Chellie Kew—photographer, wife, mother, holistic health practitioner, and former fashion model—had a dream: she would do a book of photographs of children touched by AIDS, focusing on their courage, not on the disease. Little did this American know that the dream would lead her to criss-cross sub-Saharan Africa, face danger and even death, and found a non-profit organization to help AIDS orphans on that continent.

When Kew’s husband was transferred to Johannesburg, the couple and their teenaged children left their Oregon home, off on a two-year adventure. Soon Kew was learning first-hand about the devastating effects AIDS is having on the children of Africa.

Over several years, Kew traveled to squatters’ camps, refugee villages and homeless shelters. She was amassing knowledge—and photographs—of the orphans of the AIDS scourge. “Entire villages are run by children,” she reports. “All the adults are dead from the virus.”

Kew started The “Q” Fund for AIDS, a non-profit dedicated to helping shelter, feed, protect and educate these orphans. To fund these projects, she planned to create a book of the photographs she’d been taking, sometimes in areas dangerous enough to require the “chaperone” services of an ex-CIA operative.

On one of her journeys, alone and hurrying to meet a missionary guide in Namibia, Kew swerved to avoid an impala. Her truck flipped on the washed-out road. When she came to, she realized she was hurt, far from the main road, and in leopard country. Then, a harrowing night and the morning horror of seeing leopard tracks around the wreck. The temperature in the truck would soon hit 120, and Kew needed medical attention. She started walking, hoping to find help, hoping to avoid attack by the predator tracking her. She told herself that she had to survive if she was to get the children’s pictures to the world. After five hours of suffering and fear, she was found by a hunter.