By Cara Brooks | HFOS Board of Directors Member & Clerk
Greetings to all! The team at Hope For Our Sisters Inc., in partnership with the Aftercare team at CEML Hospital in Lubango, Angola, is pleased to bring you our latest impact report for our project to "Enable 50 Women in Angola to Generate Income". As always, we are so thankful for the support of each of you in bringing this program to our sisters who have suffered from fistula and are living at the patient villas in CEML, either awaiting or recovering from surgery. This program equips them with literacy, numeracy, and language classes and teaches them marketable skills such as gardening, sewing, and crafting that they can take forward into their lives outside of the hospital to support themselves and others in their families and communities. These women are able, and amazing, and so deserving of these opportunities. We cannot thank you enough for helping them to realize dreams to learn new things and become more self-sufficient. The growth of this program has also enabled it to become entirely self-sustaining - the sales of products made cover the costs of new materials for the subsequent projects!
From April through June, 47 women staying the patient villa at CEML have had the opportunity to attend Aftercare offerings. Thirty-two of these women have been healed and are truly looking ahead to their future outside of the hospital, while the others are between or awaiting procedures.
The team reported that in addition to physical healing, this period in particular has seen a lot of women undergoing emotional healing. Many are speaking of the peace and encouragement they find in the community of women at the patient villa from the moment they arrive, still wet and suffering from fistula, still feeling ashamed and marginalized and abandoned and hopeless. Our partners say some miracles are subtle, though breathtaking, like watching a woman who has never even held a pencil write her name for the first time. Others are deeper and even more profound, like the changes in spirit and confidence they behold in some of these precious women and girls.
Audrey, one of the fistula nurses wrote, "The most common phrase we have heard when women arrive at our villa, whenever we ask them to do some work, is in Umbundu language 'sicitenlã', which means 'I can't'. We make a joke of this when they return home with a totally opposite speech, which is 'ndicitenlã' which means 'I can'. This has been our great satisfaction."
We hope you are continuing to find inspiration in these reports every few months. Feedback and questions are always welcome via email, sent to Cara at cbrooks@hopeforoursisters.org. To learn more about Aftercare between reports, or our other programs, visit the link below to our website or follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook (Hope For Our Sisters, Inc.) or Instagram (@brookehfos). Thank you again for your generous support of this project and these precious women.
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