COMPASSION IN TEH FACE OF TRAGEDY.(LOCAL/STATE)

When the Rev. Kenneth Walsh officiated recently at the burial of a 30-year-old AIDS victim, a Port Charlotte mother of three, he very nearly "lost it."

"For the first time in my 15 years of ministry," he said, "I was truly overcome. I had counseled her from the time she had arrived in Port Charlotte and was there at her bedside when she died." The woman had acquired the disease from her late husband up North and had come home to her elderly parents because she had no other place to go with her children.

Walsh is the resident chaplain for the Charlotte HIV/AIDS Network, the nonprofit, volunteer group that provides care and support to people with AIDS or the …