Hope For HIV/Aids Life Support International

Suzan Martin School

by Kathryn Louis

Meeting the Chair and Head Teacher of The Suzan Martin School

Rex

THE CRAWLING BOY IN MAKOKO

When you walk through the shanty buildings on your right into the community and get across a local church called the Foursquare Gospel Church down the lane to your very straight right is a wood building where you will always see a boy crawling almost every time.

His name is Friday and was born on 15th March 2002, moment after delivery he was expected to to hear the newly born crying but the case was not and with panic and curiosity the Nurses came up with idea of giving him some certain injections which were suspected as the eventual course of Fridays present predicament. Several herbal/native treatments did not help

Fridays growth over the years has been abnormal as he cannot walk, unable to talk normally like every other children, because of this abnormality he could not go to school unfortunately, he has been denied of basic education.

All these were mainly because of poverty for Fridays parent are very poor and could not take him to almost free government clinic for proper medical attention and because his parent have got other children, little attention is been given to Friday.

The home in which they leave is a small shanty wood structure located on top of slum beside the water shore. His mother struggles each day to survive as she realise very little income from the Roasting Fish business that she’s into.

During the mapping exercise, while we were walking bypassing the house we noticed Friday and got attracted to him.

We believed strongly that Fridays condition can be improve upon as much as he can get the necessary care and love which is purpose of our been in MAKOKO in the first instant.

Friday will leave a normal life, he will talk and walk again with care and your kind supports he shall see his life blossoms!!!!

                      

                                                                                               

Rex

Hope for HIV/AIDS Ilaje Home-Based Care Community Team

This is the group Photograph of Community Voluteers in ilaje Community where we try to reach the poor of the poorest and go further into places where no one else go, the slums in Ijora-Badia, the forgotten places in Makoko etc, we see the need, and we take action, may we all please participate in inviting and spreading this news, tell your friends to tell their friends and lets all become ADVOCATES for the children of Africa.

Hope for HIV/AIDS is moving forward, expanding and reaching further, please join us in your support by spreading the news, telling your friends and lets show our love for the orphans in Africa. We challenge each of you to invite two or more friends to join our page as we aim to reach more than 2000 people in the next month.

Rex

Hi ALL

 

I wanted to write up a report on my trip to Lagos this past week (18th-25th Oct).  Its been a extremely emotionally taxing week for me, but i intend to touch on some of the highlights from my week, some of the low lights, my perception of Hope for HIV/AIDS in Lagos, as well as just some general feedback, that you can use wherever you want.  I pray that i may be a blessing to the organization and that my experience will encourage you, and inspire others to embark on a similar journey.

 

It was an amazing privilege to be used this week.  Leaving on Saturday the 25th i had absolutely no idea what to expect when i landed, but i was really just trusting God's plan because i knew he had one for me being there. My travelling partner was Andre Venter, and this email is not on behalf of us both, but i feel that it will represent the feelings of both of us.  On the Sunday we joined Mr.Rex at His church service at Ilaje and then moved off to another church service where we did a brief programme from around 500 children.  That day was a fantastic day to start the week.  We were warmly introduced to the Hope for HIV/AIDS team, and were made to feel extremely welcome.  We were not as prepared as we could have been for the childrens ministry as we were not made aware of it until just before, however it was a good experience and one that i will never forget.

 

We proceeded to get involved with ministry with the commercial sex workers, with various preprimary and primary schools (and one highschool).  I was taken on a tour of the community meeting some of the leaders in the community, in the clinic, at the school and at Hope for HIV/AIDS.  It was a privilege being there, and i was humbled to the core meeting with them.  I was exposed to the huge need that faces the Ilage community, the Orile community, and the Curstain community.  This was very emotionally hard for me to see, but i pray that God would lead me and use me to be part of the solution that He has.

 

We met with 4 telecommunications companies, as well at a computer company to appeal for donations to get the telephone counselling initiative up and running in Lagos at the Hope 4 Aids office.  I pray that God continues to work in the hearts of the people in those companies so that Hope 4 Aids will receive the support they need to run this initiative successfully.  

 

It is still very difficult to explain what i felt being in Lagos with Mr.Rex and his team, because i'm still trying to process the millions of thoughts that are going through my head right now.  However i will say this, that i've never experience and been exposed to poverty like i saw in lagos this week, and it literally breaks my heart.  My heart cries out to the many people in the communities who want change so bad but don't have the resource to make it a reality.  I don't quite know what to say yet...but i'm really just asking God to show me an area that i can get some support to the team in Lagos because the work they are doing is AWESOME!!!

 

The Hope for HIV/AIDS team was very organized throughout the week, arranging a very busy programme and making sure that all the neccessary arrangements were in place.

 

I guess the hardest part for me was being in the company of so many people with so many needs and not being able to do anything there and then, and then not being able to promise that i would ever be able to do something for all of them.  The time handing out food on the lagoon was especially hard for moth of us, purely because we just didn't have enough food to give to everyone.  It was hard seeing the state of the Ilage school and clinic, knowing that they deserve so much better.  It was hard praying for the commercial sex workers, because i've never done anything like that, and for the first time my heart broke for people who previously i wouldn't have cared for.  

That was all hard, but one thing that touched my life in all of these instances, especially in the case of Mr.Rex, was the positive and optimistic attitude that everyone of them had, not looking to the past but having an expectant attitude that God will bring JUSTICE.  For me that is something that will never leave me.  When i think about the incredible challenges that face the people of Lagos, am i made to feel very sad and brokenhearted however, lookinh at the volunteers attitudes and expectations i am made to feel so optimistic myself that an answer will come.  Thank you Hope for HIV/AIDS so much for that!!!

 

I can't say that anybody will ever feel ready to experience something like i did this week, i certainly didn't.  But i believe that its because we are brought to feel that way that we actually ARE ready.  That God can begin to work through my weakness and be glorified in it.  But my life has been forever changed by the experience and my thoughts and prayers will constantly be for the many men and women who work tirelessly to bring about a small change in just one persons life at a time.  That is something that i will never forget.

 

My heart cries out that they will receive the resource that they need to do their job more effectively in the future, but i know that will only come from Christians who won't settle for injustice but will rise up and engage the crisis that Africa faces.

 

Thank you George for all the work that you do, thank you to the Hope for HIV/AIDS leadership for being a vessel that has opened my eyes BUT mostly i want to thank Mr.Rex for making this experience so absolutely incredible for me.  I will never cease to pray for you, and will never cease to fight a battle for you here in SA, or in the USA.  Thank you on behalf of myself and Andre, i pray that one day God will give me the opportunity to come back and be God's hands&feet!

 

i don't know if this mail is sufficient, something in me is saying that i could write a book about my experience this week ,but for now this is all there is.  I didn't prepare this, i just wrote it from my heart, and i pray that it touches and encourages you to keep up the incredible work that you are all doing!!!  Romans 1:12.  I don't mind writing up a report on every activity that i did, but right now i felt led to write this...please let me know if you require that.  I would really do anything if it helped you in your cause.

 

God Bless you both!!  I can't wait to see you both again soon!!!

 

Mark Zweigenthal

Liberty Church, Randburg

A FULL TIME voice for Hope for HIV/AIDS wherever i go! :)

 

Rex

Group Photograph of ilaje Home-based Care Volunteer team with George the CEO of Hands at Work in Africa during one of his visit

Rex

Emmmanuel Anyawu the Coordinator of Shomolu Home-based Care with a Volunteer in the Community

Canadian Volunteer Experience

Rex

I flew to Lagos in late May, worried sick about the sermons I knew I would have to preach. Three of us— Levy, a Zambian nurse and youth worker; Ginna, a young American nurse; and me, a Canadian former petroleum explorer—were in Nigeria for 10 days to strengthen our partner organization, Hope for HIV/AIDS International’s projects in Lagos and in the desert region Kano, training pastors, teaching home-based care, ministering to prostitutes, and teaching illiterate women. I sensed something about the trip would drag me to my knees. I thought it would be the preaching. It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong.
It wasn’t the foreign setting that disturbed me. Though in Lagos the air was always hot and heavy and the dusty streets vibrated beneath the rumble of at least a million people on the move at all times. We slept in the home of the Lagos project leader, Pastor Rex. And each morning at 5 am the crackling cry of a prayer call blasted into the rooms from a speaker mounted on the tower of the mosque behind his house.
On the first morning, when it happened, I lay dazed inside my mosquito net, the rhythmic roar of the man’s voice screeching in my ears, and wondered if I were really alive, whether such a thing could actually be happening. And so it continued each day after that.
Even the pastor training and preaching wasn’t so frightening. We spent an entire day teaching men of God about God’s desire for loving thy neighbour and spread throughout four churches in a weekend to preach our message. The people were receptive; activity is stirring everywhere.
And although I was certainly caught off guard by the experience of a feeding program done in narrow canoes on the sea for hundreds living on stilt shacks above the water and by home-based care done in a slum of a hundred thousand along streets lined with garbage and shallow rivers of sewage, the volunteer workers there are so fresh and full of life that, despite the enormity of their work, they display nothing but hope.
Rather, it was several small crowds of powerless women that challenged me the most. Standing in a concrete room in the Sahara desert listening to a group of women and daughters—the most vulnerable people on earth—who couldn’t write their names three months earlier, boast that now they can read the scriptures, newspapers and books, felt like a smack on one side of my face. Then I sat with other women in a small, stone courtyard surrounded by walls dotted with square holes leading into dark, dirty rooms where they sell sex and where their children sometimes stay.  Listening to their stories of shame, fear, and desperation to get out and trying to say something to them as a representative of the church, was like a blow to my other side.
Despite the valuable health and education work happening there, the experience of just being among them left me confused and confronted, feeling hypocrisy and shame drip down my back. How do thousands of illiterate women or mothers selling sex exist on the same planet I carry out my life upon?
I don’t know.
But when we left and I had time to think and to pray, I realised that despite past mistakes the place for the church was precisely among these women. If we believe there is any hope for them, in whom else could that hope possibly lie?
Lynn Chotowetz, a Canadian