A Blood Brother, Unconditional Love, and Food for AIDS Orphans in India

When you’re open to the unexpected, travel brings surprises that look nothing like the vacation brochure. Rocky Braat, a graphic designer disenchanted with his life in the U.S., transformed an impromptu trip to India into a social and spiritual mission.

In his travels through Chennai, on India’s southeastern coast, Rocky visited an orphanage for children torn from their villages by HIV and AIDS. Not even teenagers, these kids grappled with serious health problems and the agony of abandonment and rejection by their families. Despite their fate, they were happy and loving—boundlessly so. Rocky vowed to make their lives better and within a year, he’d moved permanently to Chennai to run the orphanage. “Rocky Anna,” which means “Brother Rocky” in Tamil, serves as teacher, doctor, dentist, father, and friend to dozens of children living with AIDS.

Rocky Anna and the kids are the subjects of the film Blood Brother, which won the documentaries grand jury prize and audience award for U.S. docs at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. The accolades and the film itself—charming, heart-wrenching, revelatory—have brought the orphanage much-needed attention and money, but Rocky's work continues. He plans to expand housing for teens aging out of the orphanage and offer computer training to jumpstart their career education.

Before he can start those projects though, Rocky's got to feed the kids. Eggs and milk for growing youngsters don't come cheap, so Danny Yourd, a producer on Blood Brother, launched a Rally.org campaign to buy one year's worth of eggs (that's more than 24,000 of them) and milk packets (almost 11,000).

You can catch a trailer for the film at Rally.org/bloodbrother and learn more about Rocky and the children at http://www.bloodbrotherfilm.com.