A very educational day today. We visited the Faraja Trust Fund, an organization in Morogoro committed to ending suffering caused by HIV/AIDS. We briefly met with the director of Faraja, Dr. Nkya-- someone we felt very honored to meet with because of her influential roles with government and other organizations. Faraja provides many services, including community education about HIV/AIDS, low- or no-interest loans especially for women, and legal aid on human rights issues such as property grabbing and domestic violence.
Our next stop was a school Faraja started for street children/orphans- what they refer to as ‘vulnerable children.’ They provide school materials for these children, who vary greatly in age within one classroom. The children were extremely excited to have visitors and stood to greet us with a song. One of the students asked if we could provide them with text books (they have none- just one the teacher might use), and so we left them with the equivalent of $80 for which they were grateful. They promised that they would continue reading and working hard in their studies. When asked how they got to school, many students pointed to other students, and those students in turn pointed to other students...we were encouraged by the way they reached out to each other in response to the free education Faraja offers.
One more stop: Faraja’s center for home-based care. We learned about their outreach to AIDS patients in Morogoro and purchased cloth that AIDS patients sell as an income-generating activity. Two of our group members even got to accompany the workers on a home visit to a family where the mother, her son, daughter in law, and two or three of their four children were infected with HIV. It was an exhausting day of seeing need in so many places, but we also witnessed the “drop of oil” effect. Unlike a drop of water which sinks, oil continues to spread over the ocean.
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