Help Destitute Moms with AIDS Care for Their Kids

Mark is on his way  to Cambodia to visit all of our programs, including  our  AIDS Patient Family Support Program. When we first started to post our projects on the GlobalGiving site, a friend advised me that the title of our project should be  a call to action that explains clearly what the program does. We took that advice and consequently when we listed our project  on GlobalGiving in August 2009, we chose the imperative of   Help Destitute Moms with AIDS Care for their Kids, because that is exactly what we were doing.   Now, for more than 20 years, we have helped fragile families, impacted by extreme poverty and HIV status ,live in  an extremely modest life in quiet dignity.  Key to entry into our program was that program members had no access to any other resources of any kind and were utterly destitute. A big  part of the success  of our efforts has been our policy of frequent home visits ( usually weekly, but sometimes more) , of our patient families , which allowed us to focus  of the needs of each program participant. Our update this month will spotlight one of the success stories of our program, whom we will call Ms. X.

There is an old saying that one never knows how another feels unless he or she walks in another’s shoes. We are blessed in that our current home care coordinator can truly say that.  Ms. X joined our program as a program member in 2004  , then about A 28 .  Life had been and was hard and the program really made a difference. Ms. X had lost both her parents.  Ms. X was in porrt health.  She had  not been  a good student, making her work prospects very poor in an already terrible economy.   Perhaps due to the hard life in her childhood, Ms. X only  finished  grade 2 at the government school. Her father  had passed away when Ms.X was a baby and  her mother,  passed away in 1991 when Ms. X was a teen. Her mother had been a farmer in the Communist regime.  Although not a good student in school, Ms. X was motivated to try to improve her life . Despite joining our program, she  wanted to work and  for many years, Ms. X  helped our then home care coordinator Ms. J.    Ms. J , now retired, had  identified Ms. X and another program member  as having potential and  they were recruited  to help  with certain patient work, such as taking patients to hospital  and Ms. X accompanied  Ms. J on home visits for years.

Over the years Ms. X   has continued to work with us and she now works as a  hard monitoring the patient families in our program. Ms. X has a very good idea of the needs  of these families as well as their  living and education costs, having been a program member herself and her experiences during the years when she had helped Ms. J.  Now, Ms. X is employed by Kasumisou Foundation  and over these many years,  she has worked extremely hard to build a life. Ms. X is now  married and she  has three children. Ms. X husband does piece work, making small tourist goods for an NGO and the combined income for Ms. X and her husband  is  almost enough to place them as lower middle class.

The quiet dignity , compassion and hard work of Ms. X helps us to continue to serve the  remaining fragile families in our program and we sincerely appreciate her hard work.

In a perfect world, we would love to see all of our patient families be able to make this remarkable transition, but for now, we are grateful for the hard work and  personal accomplishment of Ms. X and her efforts to help our patient families.

Our program would not be possible without the generous support of you,our kind donors and we are deeply grateful    On behalf of our patient families , please accept our heartfelt thanks.

Barbara & Mark Rosasco