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Reports
June, 2005
Road MAPS to Africa
(Submitted by John Glassford)
G 'day Fellow ROTIans
I would like to be able to share
with you all the one thing that drives me daily. I want to be able to
discuss the plight of some 12,500,000 orphans in sub-Saharan Africa today.
My goal by opening up this subject is to be able to prepare myself for the
time ahead of us at Coolamon with our Road MAPS Project. I now know that
here in ROTI there are many wonderful, intelligent and caring human beings
and I feel very much at home with you all.
Part
1: BACKGROUND & INTRODUCTION.
HIV/AIDS is a very touchy subject
as it involves religion, politics and morals. So I will not broach those
subjects as my members at a club assembly put me through the wringer when we
came to discuss and then vote for Road MAPS to Africa or MAPS for short. My
fellow members asked some very deep and pointed questions, questions that I
was prepared to answer and follow through with. In the end after a long and
heated debate my club voted 100% to support the project MAPS.
Stage 1 was to go back to
Africa and visit Cape Town to meet with an amazing woman; Mama Amelia Poswa
from Mfuleni in Cape Town. Amelia looks after 135 orphans. She started doing
this with a handful of abandoned children 35 years ago. Amelia is unable to
take in orphans with HIV/AIDS. Susan and I met Amelia and her children and
we have not been the same since.
It was at this stage that we met
President Matt Mercer of the RC of Hout Bay in Cape Town. We at RC Coolamon are
now twinned with Hout Bay and will be conducting a joint project with other
clubs to build and equip a Medical Care Centre for the people of Imizamo
Yethu in Hout Bay. This will be our Centennial Project and beyond to
Celebrate Rotary.
Once I had met with President
Matt and his fellow members of Hout Bay, visited several townships in Cape
Town, read the local newspapers for three weeks and watched local television,
I started to learn just how serious a problem the AIDS pandemic is for our
fellow human beings in Africa, especially South Africa.
What began as a visit to meet
with Mama Amelia and her children, to see what Amelia wanted for shelter for
her orphans, has led to a much larger and more complex project. Mama Amelia
is not forgotten.
Stage 2 was to garner the
support of our DG Bruce Barber. DG Bruce wanted to know why I did not want
to start a project in Papua New Guinea or a project closer to home. Having
spoken to DG Bruce at a RF meeting in Grenfell and having explained my
position and ideas I now have the full support of DG Bruce. Also, and as
important, our DGE David Roberts is 100% behind MAPS for his tenure as DG.
Part
2: SOME FACTS.
40 million people world wide now
have HIV/AIDS
24 million are in Sub-Saharan
Africa; 15 million (58%) are women.
In 2003 in South Africa there
were 5.3 million. The latest figures that I have obtained is now closer to 7
million as we enter 2005.
12.5 million children in Africa
are orphans with some 30% who are expected to have HIV/AIDS and of these
their life span will not exceed 8 years. This is expected to rise to 20
million in 5 years time.
6,500 people die in Africa every
day from AIDS. This figure could be much higher if the cases of people dying
from malaria and other diseases as a secondary cause to AIDS were included.
Households are now being headed
by 8-10 year old girls.
For further facts and figures
there are many web sites to visit but probably the most factual one is that
of Stephen Lewis, an amazing Canadian. Stephen is the UN Special Envoy to
Africa for HIV/Aids - you can garner more information here: http://www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/aboutus.html
"The AIDS pandemic is ravaging the
continent of Africa. The numbers of those afflicted and estimates of the
spread of the disease are horrendous - almost beyond comprehension. There is
no vaccine; there is only limited treatment. More than two million people
die each year. The effects on every aspect of sub-Saharan life are
shattering. Much good work is being done to try to tackle the long-term
structural and political issues. But women and children continue to suffer
and die. We believe grass-roots efforts can help many who currently have no
hope."
Stephen Lewis.
Part
3: Rotary and HIV/AIDS
At the COL 2004 there were two
items discussed and voted on regarding HIV/AIDS.
Item # 04-106:
To request the RI Board to
consider joining international agencies to eradicate HIV/AIDS as the next
international health initiative.
Voted for 94 votes against 389
votes. Rejected.
Does this mean that RI is not
going to support any Rotary involvement in this area?
Item # 04-152:
To request the RI Board to
consider recommending that the Trustees relax the building restrictions for
Matching Grants to care for AIDS orphans.
Voted for 322 votes against 182
votes. Passed.
Does this mean that we can obtain
matching Grants through WCS or RAWCS, in our case for such projects?
I note with interest that in a
message from the RI President published in Rotary Down Under (July
2004). President Glen Estess said:
"The best way to honour Rotary's past is to perform even greater acts
of service in the future. I urge clubs to support this year's four major
emphases, health concerns, water management, literacy and the family of
Rotary. Each is critical to the well-being of the global community and
offers many possibilities for Rotary service.
Every country has its own specific health
issues, be they malaria, measles, preventable blindness or HIV/AIDS. Global
health authorities report that more than 42 million people are now infected
with HIV. The disease has reached epidemic proportions in Africa, where
millions of families lack access to quality health care. Rotarians can take
a leading role in stemming the spread of HIV/AIDS by participating in public
awareness and education campaigns."
RIBI (RI Britain & Ireland)
President Gordon McInally stated on RIBI’s web site:
"I
chose to visit Africa specifically to see the scale of the problem and to
observe the work being done by Hopes and Homes for Children. I must confess I
was unprepared for what I saw, particularly in Rwanda. There is still much
evidence of the genocide that took place in the country ten years ago. Many
children have been left with nothing as a consequence of the killing and the
subsequent AIDS epidemic. There is no doubt of the urgent need for the work
being carried out in Africa and I am excited that we will involve local
Rotarians in Rwanda and South Africa. Before leaving Africa, I made two
promises to the children I had met; to tell people about them and to try and
help them.
Rotary
is celebrating a century of service to communities this year and we must give
our support through funding and service to these children to fulfill my
promise and give them a future."
http://www.hopeandhomes.org.uk/rotary.htm
So Rotary is already at work in
Africa and especially it seems for the orphans of the AIDS pandemic. This
gives me great encouragement to keep going with our project.
Can anyone see any reason as why
HIV/AIDS should not be a cause? Why should not we as Rotarians consider
joining others already engaged in Africa, as it is the children who need us?
"Children
who are infected with HIV are often discriminated against, for example,
through denial or limitations of their rights to education, health and social
services, as a result of inadequate or inaccessible health services,
treatment, care, education and social programmes."
UNICEF:
http://www.unaidstts.org/articles1/articles_details.cfm?articleId=9
Part
4 Nelson Mandela.
Nelson Mandela has been quoted on
his attitude to HIV/AIDS - here are some of his sayings:
* AIDS
is clearly a disaster, effectively wiping out the development gains of the
past decades and sabotaging the future.
* The
challenge is to move from rhetoric to action, and action at an unprecedented
intensity and scale.
* There
is no shame to disclose a terminal disease from which you are suffering.
* Those
who are infected with this terrible disease do not want stigma, they want
love.
* It
is a travesty of human rights on a global scale.
* I
was just a number. Millions of people today infected with AIDS are
classified as just a number. They too are serving a prison sentence for
life.
* A
tragedy of unprecedented proportions is unfolding in Africa.
* AIDS
today is claiming more lives than the sum total of all wars, famines and
floods and the ravages of such deadly diseases as malaria.
Nelson Mandela is a wise man who
practices what he says. This is so evident with the loss of his only son to
AIDS very recently.
Nelson Mandela is asking for help
and for immediate action. How can Rotarians help on a much larger scale than
is evident today? Is it an area where we can, as President Glenn Estess
says, serve our fellow man on a large scale?
Is it ever feasible that the
projects undertaken currently by individual Rotary clubs could become as big
as Polio Plus and how can that be achieved?
Many foundations are supporting
HIV/AIDS; such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who have put in a few
billion and a lot of it going to Africa. There are photos of Bill Gates with
African orphans.
Part
5: Summary.
I know that this is the right
group of people to discuss this matter with. I know that service in Rotary
is what I want to do for the rest of my life and all that I am looking for
here is guidance as we at Coolamon begin our journey to Africa. Hopefully
you will tell your club members, who will tell their friends, who will
tell.... and so on. Is that not the way it works?
Coolamon can help by providing a
web site with projects in Africa that are not on WCS or RAWCS with the hope
that a club takes on one of them and has it registered with WCS and so on.
Is this against any RI rules? We ourselves will be flat out with Imizamo
Yethu and Mama Amelia.
Thank you for listening to me,
the process of writing to you all in this way has helped me enormously. Just
in the fact that I have put my thoughts down on paper looking for some form
of confirmation I suppose is enough to clear my brain.
You see I was touched by an
orphan in Mfuleni at Amelia's. This little one would not leave my side for
the whole time that Susan and I were at Amelia's over three days. I still do
not know her name and I call her my shadow. When we had to leave all the
children sang and danced for us and My Shadow would not let go of my hand.
Have you ever seen a Rotarian with his Rotary Shirt, cap and badge on crying
buckets? That little girl has changed my life.
If any of you want to be touched
by an orphan of Africa.......they need us.
Thank you so much for letting me
get this far and if you want to email me off list please do so. We are close
to launching the project with the DG and the Australian High Commissioner of
South Africa and I wanted to have a chat, that's all.
Yours In Rotary
John Glassford
International Services Director
Rotary Club of Coolamon
District 9700
Riverina of New South Wales
AUSTRALIA
huffnpuff@shoal.net.au
http://www.maps.coolamonrotary.com/
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