Over the weekend, Madonna visited Malawi with her children. She went to break ground on the girls’ school she’s building through her Raising Malawi Foundation (and plant a tree clad in stilettos), and the estimated cost for the school is probably around $15 million. Now, we know that Madonna doesn’t like to spend money. Even if it’s money that’s been raised through her sketchy foundation (in which the money seems to take a detour to anything Kabbalah related). Thus, Madge needs us to donate to her foundation.

That’s right, Madge did a Sally Struthers-esque plea for donations on the Huffington Post yesterday, with a full article (here) and video (in which her face eerily doesn‘t move). Madge is pledging to meet our contributions dollar-for dollar, up to $100,000. While I think Madge’s heart-facsimile is in the right place generally (and CB notes that she think Madge really believes in what she’s doing), I can’t help but think that Madge just doesn’t want to fund all of her Kabbalah projects herself.

On that note, Us Weekly is running this story about Madge’s visit. Apparently, an orphan told Madonna: “You are our god.” You know Madge was eating that sh-t up:

On Tuesday, along with his mother and siblings Lourdes, Rocco and Mercy, David Ciccone Ritchie made his first return visit to the Malawi orphanage where Madonna found him in 2006.

The high point of the family’s outing at the Home Child Care Center in Mchinji, Malawi: when David, 4, and his adoptive mother approached his original crib.

“It was an emotional moment,” the center’s director, Lucy Chipeta, tells Usmagazine.com, noting that the pop star, 51, wept. “David is too young to understand . . . but for us who remember the sickly tiny little baby of 2006, it was hard to hold back tears, including Madonna.”

“He is so boisterous! I can’t believe he is the same chap of 2006,” orphanage founder Thomson Chipeta told Us.

And Madonna’s celebrity — her Raising Malawi charity has helped fund the orphanage and five others in the country — was not lost on the kids, either.

“You are our god,” one young orphan told her. “Where could we have been without you?”

An onlooker noted that Madonna looked bemused by the comment but “seemed cool with it.”

Next, the uniformed children performed a traditional “warrior dance,” with David eventually gyrating to the beat as he watched alongside Madonna. Later, he and Mercy played with his old friends and he spoke a few words in Chichewa, the language spoken there. (Mercy, on the other hand, can no longer speak Chichewa. “She is pure American now,” an observer said.)

Later this week, Madonna plans to meet with Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika — and with James Kamebewa, the biological father of Mercy.

“If this young man has a story Madonna wants to hear it. If Mr. Kambewa is the dad, then Madonna won’t shield him from Mercy,” a Raising Malawi source tells Us.

Malawi is one of the southern African countries greatly devastated with HIV/AIDS. At least 14 per cent of the 13.1 million population has HIV, the virus that can lead to AIDS. There are over 2 million orphans, half of them as a direct result of HIV/AIDS.

[From Us Weekly]

While I applaud Madge for her efforts and the efforts of anyone attempting to affect positive change, I’ve said before that I have mixed feelings about Raising Malawi and the whiff of fraud around this whole endeavor. Recently, it was discovered that in the past year, Madonna’s only “charitable” giving was nearly $459,000 to the Kabbalah Centre. Not Raising Malawi, her own “charity” – which isn’t even registered as a charity. No wonder she’s asking for money.