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Volunteers battle to improve life in African nation
Aug 18, 2007 By: Jillian Follert(Originally published in 2005)
OSHAWA -- On a crowded train rumbling through the parched African countryside, throngs of travellers strain to catch a glimpse of the on-board entertainment.
Crushed between passengers and overflowing luggage racks, a young man in a bright blue T-shirt holds up a plastic mannequin leg, before carefully rolling a white sock over the foot.
The audience smiles knowingly. In a culture where sexual taboos are as common as HIV infection, this covert condom demonstration is as close to sex education as it gets.
And in a place where literacy and formal schooling are out of reach for many, cross-country trains and the captive audiences they hold are as good as any classroom.
"It was an amazing thing to watch, people were laughing because it was funny, but you could see that the message was also getting through," said Oliver Lofton-Brook, an Oshawa resident who recently rode that train between the provinces of Nampula and Iapala, in Mozambique. "Teaching people about AIDS isn’t as easy as you might think. You have to consider the education level, the cultural sensibilities, the resources available."
It’s a challenge that Salama volunteers embrace with enthusiasm. For 10 years, members of the Mozambique-based NGO have worked tirelessly to improve the health of local residents, providing lessons on hygiene, nutrition, potable water and reproductive health.
More recently, the focus has shifted to stemming the spread of AIDS, as the country struggles under one of the highest infection rates in the world. It is estimated that 1.4 million of Mozambique’s 18 million people now live with the disease.
Having watched the AIDS rate more than double among 18 to 45-year-olds since 1998, Salama volunteers know that time is not on their side. When not performing their unique brand of train theatre, the young volunteers take their message to soccer games, schools, villages, markets -- anywhere that people might stop and listen.
As with many African countries, the challenges don’t stop there. Years after a horrific civil war shattered the country, Mozambicans are still trying to rebuild basic infrastructure and locate the estimated one million land mines that remain unexploded throughout the country. Poverty, lack of accessible education and difficulty growing food and securing safe drinking water make every effort by local and foreign NGOs that much more difficult.
A world away in Oshawa, Mr. Lofton-Brook, executive director of the Adventist Development Relief Agency (ADRA) Canada, and members of CAW Local 222, are up to the challenge. Both organizations regularly provide funding to COCAMO, a coalition of Canadian and Mozambican agencies. For ADRA, this is just one of many national and international initiatives supported through member donations and fundraising. Its scope ranges from soup kitchens in Canada, to aid for land mine victims in Yemen.
Joe Sarnovsky, a member of Local 222 which represents thousands of Oshawa’s GM employees, said his union got involved through a social justice fund that sees a few cents from each employee’s weekly wage go to help developing countries with labour and humanitarian efforts. In 2003 he was asked to sit on the COCAMO board, and travelled to Mozambique for the first time. Last month he and Mr. Lofton-Brook returned, spending two weeks observing COCAMO’s partner groups at work.
One of these was Nivenyee, an organization that works to alleviate the isolation and uncertainty that strikes households where AIDS is present.
"The volunteers are people that have HIV or AIDS themselves, but instead of giving up, they’re reaching out to others," Mr. Sarnovsky said. "They do home visits, they help pay for kids to go to school if their parents are too sick to work anymore, they help people buy discounted food. It’s an inspiring thing to see."
During their recent visit Mr. Sarnovsky had the chance to visit people benefiting from the program: Two orphaned brothers living alone in their family’s tiny hut after their father died; a single mother whose neighbour tried to steal her property while she received treatment in hospital; a woman too afraid to tell her parents she was HIV positive.
"It really affected me to hear their stories, I was almost in tears," Mr. Sarnovsky said.
During their whirlwind tour the Oshawa residents also saw villagers practise new well-maintenance techniques through a program called Amasi and mothers learn how to make their children’s food more nutritious at health workshops.
Another favourite COCAMO project was the Caixa das Mulheres, a savings and credit union established to serve the low-income women of Nampula province.
"The banking system there is quite chauvinistic, the men run the show. It makes it very hard for single women, widows, even married women to put their money somewhere safe or borrow money," explained Mr. Lofton-Brook. "Now hundreds of women have borrowed the money to start their own businesses. We even met one lady who had made enough money to buy a car. That’s not something that happens every day in Mozambique."
While the country still struggles to provide for the most basic needs of many of its inhabitants, Mr. Lofton-Brook says these small accomplishments can’t be overstated. In the coming months, both ADRA and the CAW will begin to consider funding for next year’s slate of projects. In the meantime, photos of smiling faces against bright blue skies provide a daily reminder of lives changed thousands of kilometres away, and the inspiration they provide.
"We hear people talk about poverty and struggles in Canada, but you don’t see people here starving with distended stomachs, you don’t see orphaned children living alone and people missing arms and legs from land mines," Mr. Lofton-Brook says. "But despite these things, the people of Mozambique are friendly and hardworking and generous. They smile a lot. I think it’s something we could all learn from."
