#livelihoodsupport

Hellen is already 50 years old, but still have six children in here care. She, like so many women in her community, has taken in orphaned children and is working hard to ensure that they have a chance at a bright and happy future.

In 2010, Hellen was struggling to make ends meet just providing for basic needs of shelter and food. Working as a petty trader she was earning just 50,000 UGX ($20) per month.

Then, she joined a Caregivers group convened through CAP/AIDS' local partner Needy Support Centre. With funding and technical assistance through the CAP/AIDS Network, these caregivers received training, mentorship and start-up capital to establish new cooperative enterprises. Taking what they had learned and with their investment of $2,000, these 18 caregivers were able to purchase all the supplies and tools they needed to begin a jewelry making and SimSim paste production workshop.

By the end of 2012, Hellen was earning 200,000 UGX per month, and was supporting four of the children to attend school. A remarkable transformation for her family in a short time!

Now that their business has become more established, Hellen's income has increases to over 280,000 UGX ($120) per month - enough to provide for all the children to attend school, receive medical care and take care of all their household needs.

Not that Hellen's efforts as a Caregiver is easy. Hellen's family along with much of the Needy Support Centre membership has twice been evicted from their rented homes in squatter settlements of Kampala. Having to relocate for second time just recently is putting pressure on their group as they are no longer living in close proximity. Nonetheless, they are determined to continue in their enterprise and to support each other as a group. Together they are supporting more than 89 children!

FROM THE ARCHIVES - check out this video made by a former intern about the NSC Caregivers group back in 2012.

Joyce uses her bike to provide for her family and to reach out to other HIV/AIDS affected members of her community…

You can put your bike to good use too on June 15th!

Joyce is quick to express her gratitude for the generosity of the Canadians who helped CPA/AODS to provide her with her bike and supported her to develop a sustainable livelihood so she can provide for the many children in her care.

She hopes you’ll save the date and plan to join the AIDS Ride for Africa on June 15th so more families can experience the benefits she has!

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More about Joyce and her amazing home filled with children:

  Joyce Oroma is a grandmother, caregiver of AIDS-orphans and is also a volunteer mobilizer of CAP/AIDS with CAP/AIDS’s local partner Needy Support Centre in Kampala Uganda. Joyce is the embodiment of giving – working hard to feed, house, clothe and educate 20 orphans while also providing counseling, care and support for people living with HIV&AIDS in her community!

As a widow, and sole provider for the household, Joyce’s life is anything but easy. Until just a few years ago, she was earning a living by acting as a ‘middleman’, buying maize on the outskirts of the city and carrying it 4km downtown to a market where she could fetch a better price. The money she earned was barely enough to feed all the children. She wanted the children to go to school but they were often chased away because she could not pay their schools fees.

Way back in 2007 Joyce received a bicycle through our Bike to CAP/AIDS program. The bicycle makes transporting her maize very easy and allowed her to make two or three trips in one day – thus tripling her income! She has also turned it into a bicycle taxi in her neighbourhood. This earns her 15,000 to 30,000 shillings (approx $6 to $12) per day.  Now she earns enough to feed her family and to pay school fees for all the children in her care. The bicycle also helps her in her mobilizing and makes transporting herself to counsel people much easier.

Recently, Joyce also joined with other caregivers in the Needy Support Centre community to diversity their livelihoods through new income generating projects. She is working with others to grind SimSim Paste which they package and sell at local markets as well as to make jewelry which they are trying to market through boutiques in tourist areas. These activities have been supported through CAP/AIDS’ This Sustainable Livelihoods for AIDS Orphans and Caregivers Project through which Joyce and the others received training in small enterprise management, support for developing their business and marketing plans as well as start-up capital.

The extra income she is now earning helps Joyce to access treatment for the children in her care who are HIV positive.

We are nearing the end of our six months here in Kampala and we made our final field visit to Lira last week.  The official objectives of this visit were to implement a financial training workshop and to begin the implementation of an empowerment project designed by Veronica and I.  However, this trip also represented the first of many goodbyes as we prepare to leave. 

We were happy to be back in the village with our friends at Aboke HIV/AIDS Women’s Association.  The first day in the village we facilitated a financial management workshop for the members of AHWA.  For this workshop we brought along our finance officer from Kampala, Mary.  It had been a few years since she’d been upcountry and the group was very happy to see her.  She co-facilitated the workshop with our field team leader, Simon.  Our program officer, Tracy also came along for the trip.  The workshop was well received and the group learned how to manage their finances more effectively and how to keep things accountable. 

The following day we traveled around the sub-county to interview beneficiaries for a small project.  Veronica and I fundraised some money from our family and friends, and designed a project to put the money to good use.  Our project, “Empower a woman: educate a generation of AIDS affected children” aims to economically empower the caregivers of orphans so that their children can go to school.  The beneficiaries all have a small business, though many of them are struggling.  With the little money we raised, we are investing the money in these small businesses to increase the income of these caregivers so they can afford to educate all the children they support.   We spent the whole day talking with the beneficiaries and it was very rewarding.  We listened to stories from people who had lost many loved ones, but who were still struggling for something better, to put the younger children through school. 

AHWA is a community-based organization that is driven by concern and compassion for community.  When we approached the members about wanting to use this money to ensure that disadvantaged children had the opportunity to go to school through empowering their caregivers, they already knew who in their community needed this help the most.  They know their neighbours and they take an active interest in their wellbeing.  For development organizations like CAP/AIDS, groups like AHWA are invaluable to reaching the right people in a community.   

At the end of the day, we had to leave Aboke.  It was an emotional departure because the people within AHWA mean so much to us now.  Both Veronica and I have been so touched by the hospitality they have extended to us and the passion with which they care for their community.  We are very lucky to have worked with them. 

The rest of the team went back to Kampala, while I made my way to Gulu.  In my hand, I had a DVD of our World AIDS Day videos to deliver to one of our partners, Two Jonyo Peyero.  Their members helped us with the video and we wanted them to have a copy.  The video takes questions from Canada about HIV/AIDS and answers from Uganda and Tanzania.  To see the videos visit the CAP/AIDS Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdsUzppgSfFYDmQtTYUlwCQ.  Almost all of the members of Two Jonyo Peyero are in our promo “Zero” video which highlights the theme of this year’s World AIDS Day, “Getting to Zero”.

I ended up missing the last bus on Thursday afternoon so I stayed in Gulu for an extra day.  I spent the day with a friend who I had met over Christmas while hiking in the Rwenzori Mountains.  We headed out to the villages for an afternoon football game with a bunch of kids.  It was a wonderful way to spend my last day in Northern Uganda. 

The last few weeks have probably been some of the best I’ve had since arriving in Arusha over 3 months ago! I spent the last week on a field visit to Nairobi, where I was visiting CAP/AIDS’ local partner, Kijiji cha Upendo (KCU), which means “Village of Love” in Swahili. KCU provides assistance to guardians and families who are caring for orphans and abandoned children in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum and one of the biggest slums in Africa.

Through KCU’s income generating support, guardians are able to improve their businesses by receiving small loans and business skills training. School fees are also paid for, thereby allowing for guardians to send all their children, orphans and biological, to school. And since many of the children have been affected and/or infected with HIV/AIDS, KCU also works to provide community education, counselling and support on child protection, HIV prevention, drug and substance abuse, among other topics.

Andrew Obara, KCU’s co-founder, was an excellent host, showing me around Kibera and arranging for me to meet with numerous guardian and children beneficiaries.

It was an amazing experience, to walk among the many, many people living in Kibera, through the muddy and garbage-lined streets, down narrow paths between corrugated metal and mud huts. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting with the women beneficiaries, all whom operate their own small businesses selling vegetables and fruit on the side of the street, or with small shops and stands selling beauty products and toiletries. Everyone was so busy living!

For a more detailed read on life in Kibera, check out The Economist’s article from last year here: http://www.economist.com/news/christmas/21568592-day-economic-life-africas-biggest-shanty-town-boomtown-slum. Reading it might just challenge some of the preconceptions you might have about life in an African slum. Prior to visiting KCU in Nairobi, I had the absolute pleasure of spending the previous week on holiday in Zanzibar. With my sister, who had come to visit me from Edmonton, Alberta, we wandered through Stone Town’s narrow streets, seeping up the old Swahili culture of the ancient island city centre. And then, the beach! Gorgeous white sand, tranquil turquoise water and a clear azure sky! Just breath-taking.

It seems as though the last month here has simply flown by! It’s hard to believe it’s already the New Year. It was was first Christmas away from home and without any snow, so was a bit harder to get that holiday-feeling. But I’m definitely happy to be missing out on the freezing temperatures and blizzard conditions plaguing most of Western and Central Canada!

Last week Allison and I travelled to Northern Uganda for our second field visit where we met with some of our partners and continued to build relationships and develop ideas for future grassroots capacity building. Over the upcoming months we will work to build financial management and project design skills with the community based organizations.  This visit was again amazing, and we were welcomed with open arms back to the Aboke village where we visited with the Aboke HIV Women’s Association (AHWA). The members stressed that while we may be from different places, and have different colored skin, we are all family! We were welcomed into the chairperson simple brick home, as we rested with her and her family.

  The next morning I woke up and went for a short walk. I stopped for a minute, surrounded by tall maize and cassava plants. The wind wrestled its way through the tall grass, and I could smell both oranges and fresh mint. The sun hit my face, and at that moment I broke into an awkward laughter; I felt so alive! While I am growing as a professional, Uganda is also helping me to grow as an individual. I am able to view life from a different perspective daily.

    On Thursday night we travelled back to Kampala, and on Friday I set back out North for my first Safari adventure. There is a saying people use here and I could not think of a more suitable saying - “T.I.A- this is Africa.” Everything that could go wrong did and yet somehow everything worked out in the end. As we drove into the park, a friend and myself laid in the back of the truck staring at the sky with no light pollution. The sky was painted with stars and the Milky Way, and shooting stars by the handful leaped across the sky; it felt surreal. Our time was not short of surreal-ness! We drove in a small jeep and later a large boat through the savannah like terrain, and stopped only feet away from lanky giraffe, leaping gazelle, wild boars, hippos, and majestic families of elephants. The weekend finished with perhaps the best part of all, a “solar eclipse.” Uganda was deemed the most accessible and best place to view it and in the area we drove to, we were lucky to see a total solar eclipse. A small town that probably had never dreamed of so much traffic, housed thousands of people.  As the moon completely covered the sun, and a bright halo appeared visible to the naked eye, the streets broke out into cheers and clapping. It was one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life. 

It’s kind of hard to believe that I’ve already been in Tanzania for over a month, but alas, it’s true!

I’ve spent much of my time meeting with one of CAP/AIDS’ local partner organizations, Women in Action for Development (WIA), assessing their organizational capacity and determining what training and additional support would be of most use to them. WIA has been a registered organization since 1999 and, as such, has expanded to provide several services to the community in both Arusha and Babati district, including a Village Community Banking microfinance programme, home-based care for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS, and a youth group.

However, I’ve also recently had the pleasure to meet with 2 additional community-based organizations, both just outside of Arusha. Training, Research Monitoring and Evaluation on Gender and HIV/AIDS (TRMEGA) is a relatively new organization formed in 2010 with a focus on assisting the most vulnerable and marginalized in a community, namely the very poor, those living with HIV/AIDS, HIV/AIDS widows, and those with disabilities. Operating with no paid staff, it’s impressive to see how much they’ve managed to accomplish!

The second group, Moringe Plus Group, started as a savings and loans group in 2008 and has evolved into a group of 30 people (26 women and 4 men) who, in addition to their own small income generating activities and businesses, carry out community outreach activities to educate and inform those in their community on HIV/AIDS and health related information. Moringe Plus operates without any kind of a budget, with members simply volunteering their own time, money and energy to their activities.

Meeting with these groups is an exceptionally rejuvenating experience; to see the work being done – all on a voluntary basis – and the passion these women and men have for improving their own communities is a site to behold! And to hear about the plans they have for increasing their activities, despite the many obstacles and shortages of time, money and resources, is encouraging and has made me feel confident that I can work to assist them in achieving some of their goals.