Global Poverty Monitor

Do you have plans on sponsoring more?

I have promised myself that I will not sponsor any more children (although that is the same promise I made when I only had four)! I think I’ll stick with my five for now, and use any additional money to send to the various projects I support. Apart from the money that I sent to the Chitima Health Centre, I have also sent $1′000 to Kantet which was used to build a classroom for Kantet’s school and buy cows for his family, and a further $800 which was used to buy spare parts for a generator for the whole community to use and some goats for Kantet’s family.

How did you come about sponsoring children?

I have wanted to sponsor a child for as long as I can remember, but I knew I had to wait until I had a job and was financially able to make the payments. When I was 16 I happened to see a documentary on TV about a little boy in Kenya. I remember that the boy said that he wished for a book, any book, so that his days working in the field would not be so long. That was the day I sent the form away for a sponsored child, and specifically asked for a little boy from Kenya. Since then I have taken up four additional sponsorships, so I now have Kantet in Kenya, Gift in Malawi, Josephine in Uganda, Chahwa in Zimbabwe and Mejooli in Tanzania.

Then you’re heading up to Kenya, can you outline these details.

After the two-week placement at the orphanage, I’ll be flying to Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, and staying there for three
nights. That’s where the *really* exciting part of my trip comes: I’ll finally get to meet Kantet. I will have been sponsoring him
for six years by then, and he’ll be 12 years old, almost 13. I can¡¦t imagine what its going to be like to finally shake his hand!
We write to each other all the time, and he speaks fluent English, which will hopefully make our meeting all the more comfortable. I have also been learning a little bit of Swahili (the national language of Kenya, and the second most prevalent language in all of
Africa, English being the first), and I hope to be able to greet his parents without a translator. I cant wait to see where he lives and where he goes to school.

What sort of thing will you be helping with there?
I really don’t know what I will be doing when I meet Kantet! It is World Vision’s policy that sponsor visits can only be for one day,
so I hope I can see everything in Kantet’s life in that day: his home, school, family and friends.

You’re heading back South Africa this year on your own accord, what does this involve? What sort of things will you be doing?

Yes, I’m heading back to South Africa in July, where I’ll be working as a volunteer in an orphanage for AIDS orphans for two
weeks. These are children who are orphaned through AIDS, and so a majority of them will also be infected. I’m going through a company called Overseas Working Holidays, which organises volunteer placements. When I found out about this program, I knew it was perfect for me. It will be really hands-on, and I’ll hopefully get to make a small difference in the lives of these children while I’m there, while at the same time noting the areas of the orphanage that need financial assistance. Once I’ve figured out
what really needs to be done to make it a better place for the kids, I can save once I get home and try to provide these things. I don’t know a lot about what I’ll be doing on a day-to-day basis in the orphanage, but I can’t wait, no matter what it is!

What about the emotional struggle, it must have been heartbreaking for you. What sort of things affected you emotionally or
metaphorically made your heart break?

The things that I saw at the Chitima Health Centre broke my heart. As you could imagine, when I returned home I really had a hard time adjusting to life as normal. Some of the things that once were important to me, like uni, my dance classes, and my boyfriend, now held no meaning. Initially, the only thing that concerned me was raising money for the Health Centre. I became very unhappy, and broke up with my boyfriend, stopped going to my dance classes, and started failing things at uni. It took a long time to recover from this state, which was largely because I felt that World Vision did not live up to its part of the deal once I returned. I understood that once I returned from the study tour my work had only just begun. I was to visit schools all over the state and speak of my experiences and encourage everyone to participate in the 40 Hour Famine and other youth activities. However, since being home for over a year I have spoken in only two schools and two youth conferences, and was denied permission to fundraise for the Health Centre. This really affected me because I had no outlet for all of the things that I had learned and experienced while I was away. My Mum and Dad were excellent, and I don’t know where I would be without their support through the difficult times. I now don’t have anything to do with World Vision apart from my continued support for
my sponsored children, and my participation in a local volunteer group which raises money for World Vision projects. I realised that I had to find my own way of doing what I know I have to do, and the only way to do that was to give up the Ambassadorship, which I did around six months ago.

What’s one specific experience that really touched you, that really reinforced the importance of what you were doing?

By far the most emotional experience I had was when we visited the Chitima Health Centre in a rural part of Tete called the Cahora Bassa district. This is basically a hospital without a doctor, one that is run by nurses because there are no doctors in the area. In one room were four women that were terminally ill, and to this day I can remember the looks on each of their faces. It was as if their souls were already gone, and there was no feeling left in them. I had conflicting emotions at the time because I felt a lot of compassion for the organisers of the heath centre, and admired those who worked there with so few resources. Yet at the same time I felt angry at them, as there was a women lying naked on a bare mattress with only a thin blanket covering her lower half; and another elderly women lying on the floor in a mess of old blankets. She was so painfully thin that I could only imagine the pain she must have felt from lying on the floor day after day. I had brought pretty necklaces and bracelets with me, that had succeeded in making other women smile when given one. I fastened a bracelet to the elderly woman’s wrist, hoping for a smile, but there was no recognition in her eyes at all. I felt so mad that these women had completely lost their dignity. It seemed so unnecessary that they should be subjected to such degrading treatment while they are dying.

When I returned home I applied to World Vision for permission to fundraise for the Health Centre. I was denied this, so instead I
took two part time jobs and worked as many hours as I could until I had saved $2′000. I send this money to the Chitima Heath Centre, and, months later, I received many letters of thanks and photographs showing how the money had been spent. The money purchased 64 warm blankets and 20 comfortable mattresses, as well as a fridge for conservation of medication and a deep freezer for food storage.

Was the experience frightening at all? Any specific examples?

I had only one frightening experience while I was away, which was when we stayed for one night in a motel in the city of Tete, before flying back to Maputo the next day. It was more like a hostel rather than a motel, with one (really gross) toilet and shower per floor. I could hear shouting in the motel during the night, and something that was either a gunshot or a car backfiring in the street. That was a frightening experience, but it was the only time that I felt at all afraid or unsafe the entire trip. The local World Vision staff did a great job of looking after us and respecting our needs which were different to theirs. For instance, they thought that Australians had to eat all the time, so they were always giving us snacks and drinks :-).

Can you outline one of the happiest moments over there?

I met an amazing man named Alexandre Nhamilando (Alex) while I was in Mozambique. He is a World Vision employee in a rural area in Tete, whose job it is to translate letters to and from sponsored children and their sponsors. He accompanied us everywhere we went while we were in Tete and acted as our translator. Some of the happiest times I had were times spent with Alex. He has an amazing life story to tell, which is great because he loves to talk. We had some really happy times together, learning equally from each other. After we returned home, Alex was flown to Australia with another Mozambique World Vision employee to visit each Australian state and speak at youth conventions. Alex’s last stop was Perth before flying back to Mozambique, and he stayed at my house with my parents for a weekend. It was the most surreal feeling to know that there is
an authentic African man, on his first trip to Australia, staying in your guest bedroom! We tried to show him all the sights during his short time here, and I don’t know who enjoyed the stay more: Alex or me. We still keep in regular contact now through letters, emails and phone calls, although Alex refuses to understand the time difference and continues to wake the whole family up at 3am :-).

People need educating in all aspects of the AIDS virus. There are still many affected people who believe that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. People need educating in various methods of birth control, which then need to be made available at low cost.

One of the most positive experiences I had in Mozambique was witnessing a group of women who we called the Sweet Potato Ladies. This was a group of volunteers, local Mozambique women, who had been trained by World Vision staff to educate other local people in various things such as birth control, nutrition and the importance of breastfeeding infants. The thing that was amazing to me was that these women were reaching out to the peers on their own level. African people love to sing and dance. They do it at school, at church, in their homes, and basically whenever something good or bad happens. It is a huge part of the African culture, and an important way that they communicate to one another. So these ‘Sweet Potato Ladies’ made up song and dance numbers and performed plays to get their messages across. They would sing a song about nutrition, and then act out a play where a woman loses a baby because she didn’t eat the healthy things that a doctor told her to eat. You could just tell that the messages really were getting out to the people, because they were being approached at their own level. While lectures and booklets work well for us here; song, dance and drama work well in Africa.

The most valuable thing that I got out of the study tour was to understand the different ways that people can help, and that before we can really help, we need to fully understand the problem.

I learned a lot about the various ways that people ‘help’ while I was away. On one particular day, we visited a day hospital for AIDS babies. While called a hospital, this was really nothing more than a row of beds, a place for mothers to sit with their babies who have no chance of survival. It was heartbreaking to see these babies and to know that nothing could be done for them. This hospital affected all of us, and we started discussing what we could do when we got home. It was suggested by one of the Ambassadors that we could send money for paint for the walls, to make the hospital brighter inside. I came to understand that this kind of ‘help’ gives us the quick fix that we are all looking for. It doesn’t mean that are hearts aren’t in the right place, on the contrary, but it does mean that we are searching for the quick answer so that we can live our lives satisfied that we have done something, made a difference in someone else’s life, without considering whether what we did was of any help at all.

What really needs to be done to fix this hospital is to fix the reason it’s there in the first place. The AIDS epidemic is getting
worse all the time, and something needs to be done to stop it. The drugs are there, but the pharmaceutical companies have the market so under control that it is impossible for ‘home brand’ medicines to be made available at a fraction of the cost.

I discovered that while people may genuinely agree that there are people living in poverty that desperately need our help, there are very different ways that they can go about giving that help. When we give, we do what we think needs to be done to ‘fix’ a situation. I think it is a difficult thing indeed to overlook what is pleasing to us, and makes us feel good, to doing what is actually needed. This involves looking outside our own cultural and personal values and really accepting those of another person.

I admit that I am guilty of this time and time again. I frequently send Kantet letters and parcels, and often find myself sending him things that I think he should have, that make me feel better about his life. I think that if he has this game, or this toy, his life will be better by my standards, and that helps me to sleep at night. It is a very difficult thing, one that I have yet to master, to really think about what this child needs to make his life better. He needs an education, and he needs training in skills that will help his family. He needs an ongoing source of food, and access to clean water and medical care.

What sort of things did you help out with over there? (specific examples please)

While we were in Maputo we played the part of tourists. We stayed in a nice hotel and did a lot of shopping and sightseeing. We went to some historically significant places in Maputo, and also drove through some slum areas, but we were not permitted to interact with local people as World Vision Ambassadors. It was very different in Tete, however. While we were there we stayed in traditional African huts, and wore World Vision shirts whenever we were out. We ate with the local people, danced with the kids, and slept with the bugs :-). I found that part of the study tour much more rewarding, and it felt great to interact with local people on a personal level after a few days of being a tourist. Even still, we didn’t do a lot to help out as such. We were treated like royalty wherever we went, which was nice in some ways but also made me feel quite uncomfortable. These are the people we are there to help, yet we sit in the chairs while they sit on the dusty floor, and we visit their homes and eat one of their goats that they have just killed, and bananas off their own trees. In honesty, we did a lot of looking and not a lot of helping, which was not what I had expected. I had to change my thinking while I was away, and use the trip as a ‘fact finding mission’, to work out for myself where the help really is needed.

When did you travel in 2005 and how many were part of your group?
We travelled for 11 days in January 2005. There were eight in our group ¡V one Youth Ambassador from each State and two chaperones from the Melbourne office.

Where did you actually go?
We flew from Perth to Johannesburg, South Africa, and spent one night and part of a day there. We then flew to Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique, and stayed there for three nights. After that we flew to the province of Tete, in the north-west part of Mozambique, and stayed there for another five nights. On the way home we had one last night in Maputo, before flying home with a short stopover in Johannesburg.

How long did you stay?
Eleven days in total.