A GUTSY HIV positive 12-year-old who visited her family in Ipswich for the first time last month is today back home.

A GUTSY HIV positive 12-year-old who visited her family in Ipswich for the first time last month is today back home.

Thanks to the generosity of people across Ipswich and beyond, Aids orphan, Becky, has returned to her Cape Town orphanage having helped to raise £3,000 for other sick children.

Becky is the adopted daughter of South African couple, Xris and Karl Kroger who know live in Mansbrook Boulevard, Ravenswood.

Mrs Kroger adopted Becky soon after she was born. Both Becky's birth parents succumbed to Aids and left her orphaned.

Thanks to an anti Retroviral drugs trial funded by London-based charity, OnetoOne Children's Fund, Becky was well enough to visit the Kroger's at their new home in England for the first time last month.

She spent time with her adopted parents and squeezed in a visit to an Ipswich Town game, a tour of 10 Downing Street with Cherie Blair and a trip to Lapland.

Becky travelled home on Wednesday, in the knowledge that the people of Ipswich raised £3,000 - more than 42,100 South African Rand - to go towards her care and that of the other children looked after by Cape Town's Nazareth House Orphange.

The money is enough to look after Becky and the five other girls who live in Arnold Cottage, which is run by the orphanage, for an entire year.

The money has already been transferred to the orphanage and Mrs Kroger said: “All the girls at the cottage are going to get new beds and she's very excited about that.

“I've been absolutely shocked by the response we've had, HIV and Aids are a relative unknown quantity in England.

“I've also been very proud of the way Becky has handled everybody's uncertainty. She does understand it is something different for them and she has coped extremely well.”

The fundraising effort was helped by a music night in Ipswich headlined by the Suffolk School of Samba. Becky's family had hoped to raise a few thousand pound but the public were so touched by her story that donations flooded in. Mrs Kroger said Becky's trip to

Mrs Kroger said: “Her dream was to see snow and last week she managed to go outside and hit me with a snowball. She wrote her name in the snow in the street. Seeing snow was her dream come true, it was all she really wanted.

“Everybody has been really lovely to her, she sends them all lots of hugs”.

N Have you been touched by Becky's story? Write to Your Letters, Evening Star, 30 Lower Brook Street, Ipswich, IP4 1AN, or e-mail eveningstarletters@eveningstar.co.uk