work

I thought I'd put up some pictures of the work that I do here...

I do home-based care for people living with HIV/AIDS.

We have almost 600 clients in Serengeti District, but we focus on clients from within 14 villages that are a bit closer to Mugumu.

I work with 28 volunteers and 2 full-time staff,

doing home visitation, transport to and from hospital for emergencies, providing medications, nutritional supplementation, soaps, and praying for clients who are sick.

The majority of our clients are women over the age of 40 who are married.

Last year we registered 18 new clients under the age of 10.

People living here do not have it easy - from food and water resources, to paying for children's education, to transportation, to lack of employment, to broken families, to health care, everything is a challenge. Many of our clients live in very isolated settings and it is a major barrier to them obtaining good health care.

Sometimes they come all the way to the hospital but there is no doctor available to see them.

Mugumu does have a clinic supported by the government to provide free services to people living with HIV. And they receive free ARV medicines. But there are still challenges to making sure that they get medicine for opportunistic infections without having to pay. We stock meds to give to those with prescriptions.

So that is my work - visiting people in their homes, at the office, in the hospital. Advocating for clients who are admitted to hospital. In general just trying to support them.

We also work with over 200 orphans from 5 different villages...helping with school fees, and nutrtional supplementation.

So this is a typical home-based care run:

driving over paths like this:

to get to homes like this:

for clients like this:

this is Mama Benja, or Mary Benjamin Tumbo, the orphan coordinator, and one of the most incredible people I have ever met.

I think that getting to work with Mama Benja will have been one of the biggest blessings in my lifetime:

Here are some pics of a supply distribution for orphans,

They need shoes to go to school:

And school supplies:

This little boy was too cute:


And here are a couple pics of a food distribution we did, 2 buckets of corn per family unit:

And here'sthe woman who makes it possible for me to work:

Mama Daudi, who watches Ben and Aaron.

She has a lot of experience looking after western kids, has a great sense of humor, is incredibly strong in mind and spirit, and one senses the Spirit of God in her.

We are so thankful for her!

So there you have my work in a nutshell...