A New Year-Messages from Africa
Happy New Year from the CFC Team!See messages from Robin @ The Light Center & Amy @ AOSCI.
View slideshow from AOSCI in Mozambique, Click Here... http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=18dtdjv2.1fj1n4na&Uy=g83k80&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0&UV=39803320688_954842065206
From Robin Goff @ The Light Center/Lovelight
Spiritual Trailblazers Anchoring Light in the World
Congratulations for being awake and seeing the need to bring more Light into this weary world. Despite the alarm bells going off all over our planet, somehow many folks are able to hit the snooze alarm and fall back to sleep, lulled by the comfort of our cozy American lifestyles. While we are only beginning to scratch away the surface of our complacency in America, the truth has gone way beyond inconvenient. Denial is not a bad thing. It allows us to get up each day and do the things we need to be doing. If we would totally take in the enormity of the natural disasters, massive storms and pandemics, we could be overwhelmed and unable to react.
Over the past few years, we have seen compassion fatigue, rescue fatigue and donor fatigue setting in as our species falls into the stupor of unrelenting grief that has become pervasive. It is an important step to speak the truth that in most of the world humanity is in acute distress. I am reminded of that story about the Buddha upon his attaining enlightenment. People marveled at his new radiance and asked him what he had become. The asked him “who are you?” “Are you a god?” The Buddha replied, “I am awake.” Could it be that the millions of children in Africa who are being born in to the AIDS pandemic are here to give a wake up call for us all?
I could write pages about the stories of children experiencing things that no child should have to endure. Estimates vary from 5 to 10 million children who will be orphaned by the pandemic by the end of the decade in South Africa alone (about the size of Texas.) While losing their parents to the pandemic, these children are being exposed to every kind of abuse, heartache and hunger you can imagine. My heart expands for the grandmothers who are burying their adult children and stepping into raise their grandchildren and other children as well. But I believe my job is not just to chronicle the dramas but to thank you for being among those who are waking up to the state of world and for being willing to make a difference no matter how small or large that impact can be.
When each of us gives in whatever capacity we can, it comes together and creates change. I do believe Americans care very deeply and when we begin to truly understand the situation we do want to do whatever we can to make a difference.
We have our first long term volunteers in South Africa this year and the learning curve has been steep. Thanks to the many Lovelight supporters, Brenda Brock and Kelly Sturgeon have been in the Soweto area since Feb. 2006. They have touched the lives and hearts of hundreds of children who will remember the caring hugs and encouragement they have received from these two courageous trailblazers. They have done arts and crafts with the materials sent by individuals and churches, done large group events like Peace Camp and carnivals, built gardens, offered office assistance and spread lots of loving support all over the place. They have set up the Lovelight volunteer house that can house 6 to 8 people for visits at the Villa of Hope, an orphan care village with group homes for children. We are in discussion with the founder of the Villa of Hope about the possibility of creating a children’s hospice house in the village.
We continue to work with the Novalis Institute in Cape Town and have offered classes for Healing Touch and support for the caregivers (over 100 students this trip!).
One of our goals has been to offer support for the gogos (grandmothers). On my recent visit I was privileged to spend a day of teaching, doing Healing Touch, singing and drumming with a group of 25 gogos at the Novalis Institute! Brenda and Kelly have recently been approached by a group of gogos asking for assistance getting started with a project to help them learn beading to generate some income. There is also a girls’ home asking for help teaching the girls cooking and other life skills. The project opportunities are endless and the skills of our volunteers are endless as well. Herein lies the hope. To be there, offer our time and discover how we can serve together to create changes in the midst of some pretty troublesome times.
More and more people are here at home are creating exciting ideas for ways to be involved. Shawna Saubers Ristic and Courtney Yahl are creating a new project to take massage and infant massage training to the gogo’s and older youth. Some Youth of Unity groups are getting involved providing service to TLC here at the center and learning how we can mobilize small groups to serve in South Africa as well. Nancy Niclolay’s school in Prairie Village is teaming up as a sister school with a school in Soweto. Volunteers from around the country, and even one from Germany, are contacting us about volunteer opportunities to serve. K State is being so very supportive as is the African Studies center at KU. Right now we are gearing up for Earl Mims to take over the Lovelight house from Brenda and Kelly. Mary Frost, who has been teaching Healing Touch in South Africa for 4 years now, will join Earl there in mid-March.
Our projects continue to evolve. One of our lessons is to not get attached to any particular person or project there because everything changes. We are now considering being aligned with the brand new My Life village, which is being built for street children. This project promises to embody everything we have been looking for both philosophically and in their style of programs. We embrace the concept of creating a village model in a setting more like The Light Center, built using alternatives for construction methods, etc. Also this project is starting off with a high value on integrating healing work. So while we continue our learning process where we have landed at the Villa of Hope we want to keep close connection to the My Life development and our relationship with the Novalis Institute.
Meanwhile back at the farm, TLC has added the activity of children, chickens, a rabbit and two horses. Our goals for 2007 include managing our debt, expanding our living space, learning and implementing some alternative, more sustainable building methods and moving toward expanding our space for community. We continue our commitment to offering Nature Retreats, which provide a healing environment for all of us to reconnect to our hearts and to the earth. I have been deeply touched by the wonderful partnerships we are building with the Touched By Cancer Foundation and the Menorah Legacy Foundation. These wonderful people have given me hope and strength to go on with building a strong healing center here while carrying the light around to the other side of the globe. These dreams are lofty ones for a grass-roots center deep in the woods in Kansas, but we are a mighty team.
Our work is not just about providing some support for children and gogos in Africa. Nor is it about providing a healing sanctuary offering some small group intensive retreats here on the land. It is about waking ourselves up to become all that we can be in the world right now. It is about the survival of humanity. There is a powerful force of love available to us to re-create the world. If we can allow the plight of the children everywhere to pop our hearts open and allow them to be our teachers, there is hope for humanity. Our collective task is to create new ways to live together on this planet, in harmony with the earth and all species that live here among us.
--Robin Goff
The Light Center/Lovelight
From Amy @ AOSCI...
Wow – what a year it has been. Thank you all for all your lovely support, encouragement, donations and prayers. On the 10th of January we will be (graduating or) certifying with a graduation ceremony our first passing 65 students. It is really an exciting moment.
This year has gone so quickly (again) and we are most definitely at a crossroads as we have three wealthy commercial businesses looking at us for HIV training and three large organizations looking at us for grants and for partnering though nothing has been signed or sealed just yet.
It feels like it has taken such a long time to get here. Yet, I must remember it’s only been 1 ½ years since I went to the States to set up our organization and get it registered. In fact, we only received our final official registration in Mozambique in January of 2006 – not even one year ago.
Today I’m allowing myself – perhaps my first moment of feeling proud of what we have accomplished – I’m usually pretty humble about the whole business. There is a man and his wife and baby that share my house – (to help control costs and they house-sat for me when I was in the U.S.) and today, the wife, Cerene – told me she had her first experience of understanding why I do this work here.
Their worker, Thompson, lost his baby to malaria on New Year’s Eve, as a complication to HIV. Cerene and Libor’s baby is only a little bit older than Thompson’s baby and today they went to the carpentry to build Thompson’s baby a coffin for the funeral. She said, before HIV had never touched them. Even though it was all around them, they didn’t feel “involved” (even though Cerene sometimes teaches at our Center).
Today was one of those miserable cold, grey days I hate to see here in Chimoio as it means the start of death for so many. It’s been cold and rainy for two days and today there was no electricity or water in the city. Any day is a terrible day to bury a baby, but a day like to day is nearly unbearable.
As Cerene and I were talking; I was sharing with her about some of the irony of us finding success with the children when there’s no reason for us to be doing well (other than the power of God and all your prayers and support). As we were talking, I told her how when I came here I likened my coming to that of Oscar Schindler not knowing anything about saving lives and he accidentally did something good – just by being there.
I feel – at this moment – we are the same, we took an incredible chance and lept right off the cliff into nothing but Faith that everything would work out the way it was intended to, and now here we are a year and a half later and we have all these children who are finding some change in their lives because we are here. Your donations – those bits and baubles you dug out of your attics and closets have literally changed their lives. Those - few dollars here and lots of dollars there that you have donated – have built three orphan centers supporting somewhere around three or four hundred children besides the adults we are working with to give better HIV information to, through the dolls.
We have the three centers up and running, we are receiving between 100 and 120 children a day at our Creativity Center for the Support of Orphans in Chimoio. We’ve done HIV training for National and International organizations; our dolls have been presented in Zimbabwe at the Japanese Development Corps Conference for Southern Africa as a new way to teach HIV/AIDS awareness. We have been recognized by the Mozambican National Council to Combat AIDS and the U.S. Embassy in Maputo.
No organization has less reason to be successful than us – if one stops to think about it – no prior experience, no college degree or education to support the kind of work we’re doing – beyond 8th grade Home Ec and first aid;-) No large funding and backing by a large government organization, yet here we are at the end of the year – still standing, and actually - by any Mozambican terms very, very successful.
That means we survived the bureaucracy, the documents, the challenges, the language, and just the whole situation of entering a completely different culture. The first month our Center was open – in November, we billed out in commercial HIV training the amount of our rent and salaries, making us very close to sustainable in our first month of operations. . . .
Well, at least we attempt to be sustainable. We don’t have our salaries worked out just yet – they are too low, and the same is true of basics like insurance and time off and a few other basic life necessities that aren’t in place for me, or my workers. . . . But we are getting there step by step.
It’s a little bit tricky these days as we are now being approached by more and more businesses to do their HIV training that can pay us but then that takes the staff out of the center to do training instead of taking care of our programs inside the center. So it’s a bit of a balancing or juggling game.
It’s so easy to see we are right on the edge. We are at the crossroads of either stepping over and getting the proper funding and support we need and being able to get our dolls and 5 components of HIV program out to Mozambique or of having to reorganize everything about the way we’ve been running this past year and reconsider how we will go forward in the future.
Meanwhile, our kids are doing great. We are certifying 14 in sewing, 16 in painting, 14 in preschool, 7 in rural activists, and 14 in embroidery. That’s besides the other kids who have participated part time or not completed their courses. The school is completely transformed; and it looks like either Africare or Save the Children (France) is going to help us finalize our water problem and our electricity.
We still need to build a small Machessa – or kitchen for our cooking as we are cooking on the ground and don’t have proper storage for the coal or wood for the fire. It wouldn’t be a big thing except we are now coming to rain season, and it’s difficult to cook outdoors when the rain is pouring down. I’m working with the German Development Corp and they have quoted it at just over $5,000 USD to build a small kitchen with a bakery – to bake bread for the children (and as an income generating activity for our girls) and two cement counters and three very energy efficient cooking stoves.
I never thought of not having electricity as a big problem but what is happening is the computers are at the house and so I must be working at the house to get funding, accounting and administrative work done – which keeps me out of the center. Meanwhile, we don’t have the electric to run the pump in the well so we have a bit of a water problem. We also need to clean our well a bit as the water table has lowered and some has filled back in.
The girls are making beautiful dolls; and we are still in search of stuffing – Shirley is in Zimbabwe now buying us something to fill the dolls. I am also trying to find a truck to go by a nearby farm to collect some capok from the ground that we can separate and use it to fill the dolls.
So now we are on break for two weeks while I am doing reports and catching up books and things at the house office.
Just before we closed the center for two weeks, we went on home visits to the girls’ houses. We were only able to visit 7 of their houses, but they were informed we will be visiting all of their huts and visiting all of the new girls huts as well to confirm their home situations, and also to make a plan to assist them in the future through our small loan association.
Of the seven girls, 5 had no latrines, no running water and no tarembe (a small table of bamboo to dry dishes on). This means they are probably cleaning dishes with dirt from the ground – a common practice here when water is short – sort of like sandpapering your dishes. They are carrying water to cook; though probably not boiling. Bathing would be either by bucket or at someone else’s latrine. All seven of the houses were mud houses with stick and grass roofs.
Really, these girls are in pretty dire situations – the average house was smaller than the bathroom in your house with at least 3 people living in it. Two of our girls have only second grade education level. Here they don’t teach you how to write until fifth grade so these girls really have virtually no education and are either supporting younger siblings or their own orphaned children. We have girls supporting up to 3 of their own children and up to 10 brothers and sisters – incredible, Hmmm?
Our students at the Creativity Center are between age 4 and age 20 – depending on the course they are involved in. They are ALL receiving basic safety, First Aid and HIV training and awareness. . . as well as courses on making better life choices.
So, if you were thinking about a group trip for your church congregation, family outing etc. we would certainly welcome you here for a crash course in how to dig latrines, build a mud hut and properly put on a grass roof – hint – hint. I say that with a bit of humor, but my church had asked before if we would have a project for them if they come, and YES, by the way – we do.
I’m sorry to say, our digital camera has broken but I did have a disposable with me so we took photos of the houses with the disposable so we will get those photos loaded as soon as we have them of all the houses and situations. Then we can make a plan for a house – renovation project.
We had a bit of a recent crisis with our orphan girls/women. As you know, they were intended to be female older orphans who were the head of their household; supporting their younger siblings. In fact what we wound up with was:
6 girls who were exactly that – orphans supporting younger brothers and sisters
2 girls who were that but also who were pregnant
6 girls who are widows/mothers of from 1 – 3 orphans of their own.
So, as this all came to light, we had to make a decision about how we would continue since our doll sewing program was designed specifically to show young orphan girls they don’t “have to run out and get pregnant and get a man to survive”. I held a meeting with them and asked for their opinions on the matter.
Also, I asked the girls who had children, how they had found themselves in their situation, as this is a very male dominant culture. But, surprisingly to me – each one said, “They had fallen in love and wanted this man and his baby” none were raped or forced or in arranged marriages. They were just typical 14 and 15 year olds with their first crush – which here equates to having a baby (which is then immediately recognized as a marriage, unlike in our culture).
What I got was 8 letters; all saying the same thing, “I am very poor and I need the help that this program is providing and for this reason you should permit me to stay in this program and this program to continue.”
So, we had another meeting and I again asked about the future of our program and explained that I could sit in my office and make this decision as director and president, but that isn’t my choice. This program is all about making choices and how you will choose to behave and perform for your future. Therefore, it was up to the girls to choose how the program would continue.
We gave them a questionnaire asking each of them about their individual situation, if pregnant girls should be allowed in the program; if girls with children should be allowed in the program; and how they (individually) were going to set a good example for other girls that running out and getting pregnant at a young age was not necessarily a good decision and that now there are some other options in Chimoio.
Now the responses were different. With the exception of the two pregnant girls – every one of them said the pregnant girls should not be allowed to continue as once they were pregnant they were no longer an orphan but were a woman. (I agree). However, those 6 girls who already had children saw their situation as different. They felt the girls with children, should be allowed to continue because in fact they were supporting orphans (even though the only reason they had orphans was because they had chosen to get pregnant while they were orphans themselves).
I had told the girls in the first meeting we were not going to abandon them – we understood part of the misunderstanding of their situations had come from our side and that we should make every attempt to see them through. Also, I feel strongly I can’t let my judgments based on my upbringing, cloud the real situations of the culture here.
So Yuri and I made the decision in the end, based on their response. The pregnant girls will restart with us in January for two weeks to finish their training on the dolls. Then they will be given the doll pieces to finish and embroider at home and when they bring the completed doll back (minus stuffing) we will pay them half the money for the doll. When their babies are born and are old enough to stay at home they can return to the program.
For the girls with orphans of their own, we told them they will also restart with us in January for our initial “open” first two weeks and then they must bring two orphan girls who actually fit the profile in order for them to continue. At first they were a bit put off by this exercise but I explained to them. Right now we have only 40% of our girls who are truly orphans who are head of household to younger brothers and sisters, while we have 60% who are exactly the profile we are fighting against.
With each of them bringing two participants who fit the profile (and the two pregnant girls when they rejoin also) we will have 20% who do not fit the profile and 80% who do.
So, we are sewing, we have large organizations now taking a look at us and interested in supporting us – Thank you God!! We just don’t yet quite have the funding to bring in truly qualified staff for administration and accounting to get us sorted out. The main reason for this is the prevalence of NGO’s. The NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) who are here are paying no less than $350 per month for a receptionist (though minimum wage is $60 per month) and $600 for any kind of teacher or accounting person. Both of those are more than my salary right now. We just don’t have the funding at this time to compete for those well-qualified and experienced workers; and Mozambican’s see no humor about volunteering for a “white person” - they see all white people as rich. . . which we are compared to those who are living in a mud hut the size of a bathroom . . . so we continue on a bit.
We have so much to be thankful for this past year and years, I extend a very special thank you to each and every one of you for your prayers, support, donations and help.
Also, I must thank my parents for their understanding in my being gone from them during these holidays and these years. This has not been an easy situation for them having me so far away. Of course, it was through the values and lessons they taught me that I come to this work and this life in Mozambique, but I know my Mom holds onto some faith that I will return to the States and be “their daughter” again one day. I have told them I will find a way to be home for the holidays next year, as I’ve not been there since 2002.
2007 is a brand new year, full of all the hope and possibilities of a better future for our orphans and the people of Mozambique. Yet, the HIV situation here is nothing less than catastrophic- it’s a sleeping extinction of an entire country and culture – for a lot of reasons and I am afraid we will see a day when they are trying to find the last of the Mozambican’s. . . I am praying our kids will be amongst the survivors of this great tragedy. This is why we have survival skills training centers for orphans.
I pray this New Year finds each of you at peace and with your families, safe and blanketed in blessings.
God’s blessings to you and thank you again for all your support over these past couple of years, from all of us here in the small heart of Chimoio,
All of us at AOSCI – TIOS & Amy
Blessings and Grace from Mozambique,
Amy
www.aosci.org
posted by emccabemusic @ 3:57 PM
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