Contact: Larry Jacobs, 815-964-5819, media@worldcongress.org; Don Feder, 508-405-1337, dfeder@rcn.com; both with World Congress of Families 

ROCKFORD, Ill., Sept. 28, 2011 /Christian Newswire/ -- Dr. Margaret Ogola, renowned Kenyan author and medical director of Cottolengo HIV and AIDS Hospice, passed away on September 22.  At World Congress of Families II in Geneva (1999), Dr. Ogola received the WCF Familias Award for Humanitarian Service.

A pediatrician based in Nairobi, Dr. Ogola was the author of two highly acclaimed novels about the lives of four generations of Kenyan women in a rapidly changing world -- "The River And The Source" and "I Swear By Apollo."

Besides her service at the Cottolengo Hospice, Dr. Ogola was Vice President of Family Life Counseling in Kenya, which works to improve the condition of Kenyan women. From 1998 to 2002, she was National Executive Director of the Commission for Health and Family Life of the Kenya Episcopal Conference.

Commenting on her passing, WCF International Secretary Dr. Allan Carlson observed: "Margaret Ogola was a true and important friend of the Natural Family. As a wife, mother, and medical doctor, she lived an exemplary life. As a Christian, she inspired us all to greater service. As a writer, she showed remarkable insight into the human soul and underscored the power of love to transform the world.  And as a speaker [especially at our World Congress of Families sessions], she was Lincolnesque in her wisdom, brevity, and power."

Christine Vollmer, a member of the World Congress of Families Management Committee, who visited Dr. Ogola's hospice in Nairobi, reported: "The beauty and order in this hospital and the happy little faces was very striking. Margaret's care for these children was giving them a survival rate unparalleled, I believe, anywhere.  Her motherly love and her extraordinary medical excellence, combined with her vocation to defend every single life were quite overwhelming. What a beautiful woman!  The Lord be praised for raising up such wonderful pro-life people!"

On accepting The Familias Award in Geneva, Dr. Ogola reflected: "It appears that the general instinct of humanity -- standing in awe of the power of the procreative act -- was to shield the sexual act from misuse, and also to shield the society from the impact the misuse of sex could unleash on a populace..... However, by the late Sixties, this ideal of sex between only men and women committed to each other in the bond of marriage began to come apart."

There followed "the collapse of the ideal of the sacred nature of sex," leading to "children being born out of wedlock, marital breakdown, abandonment of children and the elderly who used to be held in great esteem, and of course an explosive increase in sexually transmitted disease of every kind."

Dr. Ogola, who also spoke at World Congress of Families IV in Warsaw in 2007, was a true champion of the natural family and will be sorely missed.

World Congress of Families VI will be held in Madrid, Spain -- May 28-30, 2012.  Go to www.worldcongress.es for more information or contact Ignacio Arsuaga at iarsuaga@hazteoir.org.

WCF VII will be in Sydney, Australia -- May 15-18, 2013. For more information on Sydney 2013, contact Mary-Louise Fowler, Vice-President of the Australian Family Association and Chairperson of the Local Organizing Committee at mary-louise@family.org.au.

Information on World Congress of Families go to www.worldcongress.org. To schedule an interview with Dr. Allan Carlson, contact Larry Jacobs at  815-964-5819, larry@worldcongress.org. 

The World Congress of Families (WCF) is an international network of pro-family organizations, scholars, leaders and inter-faith people of goodwill from more than 60  countries that seek to restore the natural family as the fundamental social unit and the "seedbed" of civil society (as found in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948).  The WCF was founded in 1997 by Allan Carlson and is a project of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois.  To date, there have been five World Congresses of Families -- Prague (1997), Geneva (1999), Mexico City (2004), Warsaw, Poland (2007) and Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2009).  World Congress of Families VI will be held in Madrid, Spain in May 25-27, 2012.