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July 25, 2008
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HIV/AIDS: From Alabama to Africa Part 2
by Sherri Jackson
CBS 42 News
2007-10-30 14:46:20.0
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DAY 2
We awake to the same sound this morning. It’s the Muslim call to prayer and the children getting ready for the school. Laughing playing and carrying those containers that look like the buckets you would use to water plants. I’m still not sure that’s what the children are doing, because I don’t really see any plants.
It’s very green outside our hotel room window. I was told October is the start of spring in this part of the world. Wow.
 Our day begins much like the day before. We have breakfast in the hotel at the buffet. Fresh sliced mango, papaya, pineapples, and bananas. Fresh baked rolls and pastries, not the sugary extra sweet ones like we are used to. This is a type of bread similar to cake donuts with the sugar on the outside and not quite as sweet. The French toast was pretty much like it is at home. There are fresh eggs with white yolks and milk and other foods I didn’t partake in for breakfast. We were told these foods were more British for breakfast, beans and meat with gravy. I can’t get enough of the fresh squeezed juices, orange, papaya and pineapple. I like the papaya the best.
We head out to the church for the morning worship and praise. Like the day before it’s already in progress when we get there. I immediately try to capture some of the singing and dancing on video camera. The afternoon workshop teams splits from the main group and we load up in our taxi van for day two of fact finding.
Our first stop is an orphanage deep in the neighborhoods of Arusha. I say deep because we get lost on a few of the dirt roads that seem to be leading to nowhere, before we ride into what appears to be a little village with dirt roads and mud shacks just behind an urban area with houses constructed much like the ones in the states. They look to have electricity and yards surrounded by high concrete walls.
It’s kind of odd how these two worlds co-exist divided only by a dirt road and maybe a garden. Our driver has to turn around on the narrow dirt road we are traveling. People stop and look at us. The adults are mostly guarded in any emotion shown, they smile as we wave. But the children are all smiles from the start. They run up to the taxi van waving and smiling. We begin handing them food through the windows. The adults stand by giving a quiet assurance that it is o.k. to hand them these items. One person in our party has gum and that’s a big hit with the little ones. Jambo, Asante. Our Swahili is not very good.
We continue on our journey and this time we travel down a dirt road and stop. Our taxi van is following our guide and interpreter in a car ahead of us. We sit on this dirt road much longer. The children run up to the van. Holding up my camera I ask a woman who is walking by carrying a bushel of banana’s on her head can I take her picture. Abana she says. As I prepare to snap the picture, Hilda or native Tanzanian and fellow church member on the mission trip says, No Sherri. Abana means no. Oh I say. I stop and don’t take the picture. Just then a woman walks up to the care in front of us and we move down the road just a bit to park. This is where we are getting out.
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This is another narrow dirt road, wider than the path we walked on the day before to get the Helping Hand’s school. A car can drive down this road although I would suggest a four wheel drive vehicle. The terrain is rough with deep holes and packed mud hills. There is a stream of water rushing down in a ditch running parallel to the road. The stench wafting through the air let’s me know it’s a stream that has sewage in it. There is a rickety two foot long 11 foot wide bridge over the smelly waterway leads to another neighborhood shack store. We don’t go across the bridge instead we jump over a smaller ditch on the opposite of the road and enter a dirt filled courtyard with a few concrete slab buildings with open doorways. These are small structures. There is a water spigot in the courtyard dripping into a bucket. We walk into a very tiny two room building. There is a small office and another room that has a set of bunk beds. Our group of eight is led into the office and we sit along the wall on a bench and a few chairs and up against the wall on some items stacked up creating a makeshift bench. We are visiting an orphanage today and seeing where some of the children live.
There are photos of children hanging on the wall in the office, along with posters condoning faithfulness in marriage and relationships. It’s a poster from an organization that clearly is trying to fight AIDS and HIV. The operator of this orphanage doesn’t speak English like Elizabeth Mosha did at Women in Action. Through our translator we are told that they provide care for 27 children from primary school up to secondary school (this is the equivalent of high school) some of the children live on the premises, others come to the orphanage to eat because they live with family members who are too poor to provide for them. This orphanage is somewhat different. Silphea the woman talking to us tells us she has been running the facility for three years. She has three children of her own and she is divorced. The assistance they get from outside organizations is sporadic at best. Not a consistent flow of funding they can count on to pay rent, buy food and care for the children they serve. This is the look I see in her face. A woman worn by trying to do the best she can for children who are not her own, but children who have no one else to care for them. For Silphea getting the children before they become street boys is important. Boys whose parents die from HIV and AIDS are easy targets to live on the streets and do unscrupulous things to survive.
 When we arrive the children are at school, but will be coming back for lunch soon. As our fact finding team asks questions of Silphea she graciously answers them about what the total cost of operating her facility. She tells us a widow stays at the orphanage with the children at night. I’m shocked to hear that she expects her rent to go up now that she has had visitors. The property owner lives near by and charges a hefty price for them to use this land. It’s not much by way of accommodations. There is no electricity or plumbing. The toilets are outside. They get water from a spigot so they don’t have to go out and find it.
We begin a tour of the area where the children sleep. Two bunk beds per concrete slab room. They are neatly made with a few bags stacked up against the wall. We enter another room that has a carpet in the center, and containers containing food stacked along the walls. Not many containers and I don’t know how full they are. There is a bushel of banana’s lying along the wall too. As I shoot video of all I see I hear commotion outside the window. The children have arrived. So I get some video of them through the window. As I walk outside, a few of the children begin to sing a song. These children are clearly different from the smiling happy little ones we saw yesterday. And the song they are singing is not a happy one.
We are the younger generation we are crying for our nation AIDS AIDS has killed very many people. Every where there are orphans tell me what should we do? How said I think as I listen and tape the children singing. Three girls and three boys nine to 12 years old lined up to perform a song they’ve obviously sung before. Each one steps out and asks us through the lyrics of the song to be a friend visitor and tell them what should they do? There faces seem so much older than their age. I’m drawn to Jennifer on the end. She sings and has just a little glimmer of hope in her eye. When the children finish singing they have sad looks on their faces. A couple members of our group mistake the song for happy and clap, but it takes them no time at all to realize this is not a happy song. I ask the interpreter how many of these children have lost parents to HIV AIDS. He asks the operator who tells him all of them. Tears come to my eyes as I ask record them saying their names on camera.
This is unbelievable to me. These children are speaking for themselves they want to save their generation. They have lost the generation before them. Their parents are no longer living. They are parents who should be speaking for their children. But they are gone. I’m drawn to that faucet in the middle of the courtyard again. There is water dripping from the spigot into a bucket. I think to myself any help our group gives to these children is just a drop in the bucket for what they need. I shoot video of the half full bucket of water and for the moment only see it as half empty. Just then a few little ones with big smiles come over to me and I show them their faces on the camera monitor. They smile wildly and call their little friend over to the camera and all laugh. For the moment my spirit is lifted. But I don’t forget the song and Jennifer.
We brought clothes to this orphanage too. A friend of mine from Delaware who has made frequent trips to Africa mailed them to me to carry to Tanzania. Lori’s daughter is two years old and these are things she no longer wears. I see the children and say to them, I believe the clothes are too small for these children. They are toddler clothes and shoes and underwear, as well as clothing and shoes for teenage girls or young women. But Hilda and the operator take them out of the bag and begin dressing a little one who I did not see. Her name is Miriam. They put a little black and white gingham dress on Miriam with a matching hat. We all smile. Miriam can definitely fit the dress. When they put the shoes on her, they don’t fit: too big. But it doesn’t stop Miriam from clopping around in the shoes in the middle of the crowd. I am elated that she can fit the clothes. They put the red and white dress on another little one. We get pictures of them both. I ask for one of myself and Miriam so I can send to Lori in Delaware to let her know her donation went to good use. All of us are lifted a little higher emotionally in seeing the joy associated with this small gift of clothing. We are thanked and begin our exit of the orphanage. I stop to hug Jennifer. My friend Skip Taylor who is also drawn to Jennifer gives her words of encouragement. He says I’m going to get this picture to you. Jennifer is 12 years old and she remains on my heart.
We say our goodbyes and leave the orphanage. The way out of the neighborhood is much easier. We travel the dirt road for some distance before turning right and crossing the railroad tracks to a paved road. We pass a neighborhood with houses and before long are on a busy downtown street with shops and people bustling about. It seems we have been moved through a time warp. Just ten minutes ago we were on a dirt road, in a dirt filled courtyard of an orphanage that had no electricity or plumbing. The children there sleep rooms with concrete walls on bunk beds. We can not stop talking about this orphanage inside our taxi van.
Our next stop is to a cultural center which is probably the most tourist like activity we have done since our arrival in Arusha. We do enter pass armed guards to the center. The guards have rifles not the side arm weapons we are used to seeing on the hips of police and guards in the u.s. We are greeted by drumming and Skip from our group joins in beating the bongos with the two men playing drums and xylophones.
The ladies are excited about this place because they have traditional toilets. So far we have only seen floor toilets. We have been calling them the hole. Because there is not much of an infrastructure in some of the areas where people live the toilets are made in the ground making them easy to flush. The toilet at the orphanage did not have a flusher. The one at the church did. But here at the cultural center they have the toilets we are mostly used to in the U.S. I meet a Canadian woman inside who says take advantage of the toilets. There are not many like this. While in the cultural center we see some tanzanite and get a lesson from the shop owner. He has a signed photo of former secretary of state Jim Baker and of former president Bill Clinton. He is photographed with Clinton in the photograph hanging on the wall. I learned that tanzanite can only be found in Tanzania. It’s a beautiful blue gem that is cut like a diamond and measured in carats. I love the stones, but did not budget to buy any on this trip. There are wood carvings, a restaurant and a t-shirt/clothing shop at the center. I buy postcards for friends and help Skip pick out a t-shirt.
 Since we were late the day before our guide is rushing us back to the vehicle to get us to the hotel in time enough to eat lunch and change before our afternoon workshops. I’m stressed about my afternoon workshop because I was told the night before I would be addressing the pastors wives. I only prepared a workshop for programming and could not figure out how to do the pastors wives workshop.
We get about 30 minutes to eat and change before we head out to the church. Linda Elder our pastor’s wife feels strongly that I should talk to the pastors wives about sexual purity and reaching out to young girls. This is part of my own testimony and I didn’t feel I was prepared to share that with this group but I go with it.
When we do these workshops they are done through a translator and somewhat different than how I normally speak to groups. We stop and start and I found it a little more difficult on this day because I wasn’t speaking from a prepared speech. I spoke mostly about the women leaders in the church being examples and talking about issues young girls were curious about and addressing them from a spiritual and physical perspective, telling them about physical and spiritual consequences. I moved into the discussion about HIV AIDS sharing statistics that I gathered for the story I’m covering. One of those statistics is that 95% of HIV infections were from heterosexual contact and young girls and women 15 to 25 years old were the primary victims. I told them about Jennifer who I had just met at the orphanage and whose parents were dead because of this disease.
When I opened the floor for question and answer my translator Samuel repeated a woman’s question who said they had recently opened began an organization to help young girls who were affected by HIV and that in the short time they were in operation they have been overwhelmed by the needs of the people. She asked what can you do when the need is so great. I heard myself then talking about the bucket of water I saw at the orphanage. Except as I told her about it, it became clear in my spirit that the bucket was not half empty it was full. I told her that God would not give her task that he would not give her the resources to complete. I heard myself say we all have a part to play and even if it’s just a drop in the bucket, if we all do our part, just like the bucket in that courtyard we begin to fill the overwhelming need...each one of us dropping into the bucket until it eventually overflows. It was an amazing moment for me to be able to articulate what had been rumbling just beneath the surface for me all day. What do you do with the overwhelming need? The answer for me came in that woman’s question. Amazing I thought. The women applauded. An interperater delayed applause but the applause wasn’t for me. To me it was for the answer we had all been shown from the woman’s question.
I would later learn that one of the women in the room was HIV positive. She did not share that with the group, but with our interpreter Hilda who is also a minister’s wife. Hilda shared the woman’s truth with me at dinner that night. We ate together as a large group that night. Many of us were anticipating our Safari the next day. We were leaving at 6:15 in the morning. As I closed my eyes on all that I had seen on second day in Africa, I thought the Safari might be a good escape. Somehow I knew contrary to my thoughts the reality was there was no escaping what I experienced this day. So I slept lightly because I didn’t want to forget, nor did I want to oversleep for the Safari.
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