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Photograph by Fernando Garcia
| SAMARITAN
Urban, center, during a recent visit to a Kenyan slum |
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Posted Sunday, April 20, 2003; 14.23 BST
"I'm a nobody," insists Hannes Urban. "I'm at the back of the queue." Try telling that to the street kids he has helped in Nairobi, or the people in Veracruz to whom he brought mobile health clinics and free medicine.
For them, the bearded Austrian taxi driver, 46, is a modern-day Samaritan they call Father. Urban's one-man mission was born in 1998, during his first trip to South Africa. Moved by the homeless of Cape Town, he vowed to raise donations back home in Vienna for what was to be the first of many projects: a kindergarten in the remote village of Kuyasa.
Slowly, by talking to friends and passengers, donations began to roll in. A newspaper article about Urban, pasted in the back of his old beige Mercedes, prompts curiosity and contributions.
The kindergarten in Kuyasa is still not complete, but Urban's organization, Helfen Wir! (Let's Help), also supports projects in other parts of Africa and Latin America. In June he will send a shipment to 70 orphaned and abused girls in the village of Makeni, Zambia. Among the text books and other essentials will be birthday boxes made up for each girl. "I do this with my heart," says Urban, "because there's not enough love in the world."
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