Possible Dreams International

Dear Friends,

As we approach the dawn of a new year I wanted to take a moment to reflect upon the wonderful journey of hope which we have embarked upon together this year.

Possible Dreams International aims to build bridges of compassion across whose arms we can bring real and tangible hope to people living in desperate and dire circumstances in the country of Swaziland. A place with the highest death rate, highest proportion of orphaned children and highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the world.

Our ambassadors around the world are ordinary citizens who share an extraordinary vision. A vision in which distance does not equate with the dilution of another human beings sorrow or our responsibility as global citizens, and where ideas of ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds are challenged by an unfailing belief in the salience of our common humanity.

I wanted to share a few stories of the work which people like you have been doing for the people of Swaziland…. and also share stories of the results which your generous and persistent efforts have been able to generate.

AMBASSADORS

Our ambassadors hail from every walk of life and every continent on this blue planet.

Let me share with you a few inspiring stories of  the ways ‘ordinary people’ like you are helping to bring real change to the people of Swaziland (there are far too many to list individually, but each one is reverently and deeply appreciated) :

Our initiative 3100 dinners for Swaziland continues to be a resounding success, with dinners happening all over the world. One such dinner was conducted by Helen in Melbourne Australia who had an African themed 30th Birthday party to raise funds and spread the word about the work of PDI.



Liann in the United Kingdom ran a  sponsored half marathon to raise funds:


In Masachusetts, Linda organised a fairtrade coffeehouse at her local church to raise funds and awareness:

In New York city the Possible Dreams American fundraiser was a wonderful success!



In the United Kingdom, Tessa continued to create and sell her beautiful artwork to raise funds….



In Australia, religious groups such as Burwood Heights Uniting Church and the Islamic Council of Victoria have been extremely generous in their compassionate support of the work of Possible Dreams International.

Thanks to Australian ambassadors Susan Carland and Waleed Aly, half the proceeds of the Australian Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanners annual dinner and charity auction were donated to PDI.



In India, 12 year old Dharini is creating greeting cards, some for the orphaned children of Swaziland and some for children in the slums of New Delhi.

These are just a few of the activities which our ambassadors have been organising around the world… To each and every one of you, as well as those who have made donations or sent messages of support, we humbly extend our deepest gratitude on behalf of the people of Swaziland.

DREAMS COMING TRUE

Thanks to the support of our ambassadors and donors around the world, we are able to continue our work in Swaziland.

Providing

1. Emergency aid relief to very sick and impoverished famlies in the form of food, clothing, education and medical care

2. Sustainable Community empowerment such as the building of houses, drilling of bore holes to provide clean water for communities, the building of orphan care points.

Let me share with you just one of our recent projects through the words and pictures of  our Good Shepherd Hospital/Home Based Care project manager Kathleen Hartmann:

“Lomlawuno’s story.


Lomlawuno is a petite woman with a beautiful smile and a gentle soul. She cares for her seven children in a small mud and stick hut in Mpolanjeni, Swaziland. Her husband died of AIDS and sadly she has recently been diagnosed with this devastating virus. The Home Based Care team, from Good Shepherd hospital ,brought medical assistance and support during the months when babe(Father) was suffering from the opportunistic infections caused by HIV.

After Babe died the team continued stop in when visiting the sick in the community and soon realized  that Make(Mom) was ill. They were able to assist her in getting to Good Shepherd and thankfully she was able to get started on ARV’s, antiretroviral therapy, in hopes of slowing the virus and reducing her chances of developing AIDS.



Possible Dreams International engaged the community and built her a home where she could care for her children and live in relative comfort and dignity. Lomlawuno’s neighbors provided the water necessary to mix cement. Volunteers helped to carry blocks and dig the dirt. Other neighbors helped paint the house and one old Gogo (grandmother) made  curtains by hand for Lomlawuno to hang in her window on the day her new home was completed.”






Friends, to my mind, there is nothing more beautiful than a bridge.

It is the ensign of hope. The harbinger of change.

The bridges of compassion which we are building together, span oceans and continents. We are reminding one another that our dreams of intervening in the insidious cycle of extreme poverty and HIV infection are eminently possible.

That we are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.

And that together,

We can,

A happy and peaceful new year to you and yours,

Maithri

Dr. Maithri Goonetilleke

Executive Director – Possible Dreams International, Inc

Below are links to a recent radio interview on Australia’s ABC radio – The Conversation Hour – discussing the plight of the Swazi people and the work of Possible Dreams International.

PART ONE = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jci5vbIYV6I

PART TWO = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBLZabwF2hY

Friends,

Today is World AIDS day.

There are currently at least 33 million people living with HIV/AIDS in our world. Of these over 22 million live in Subsaharan Africa.

In the African context HIV/AIDS is inextricably linked to extreme poverty. We cannot address one, without the other.

Possible Dreams International works at the community level, with people in their homes, bringing compassionate care in the form of emergency aid (food/clothing/shelter/medical aid) and sustainable solutions such as the building of schools and the provision of water for entire communities.

By doing this we hope to intervene in the cycle of HIV/AIDS and poverty, bringing tangible hope to those for whom hope is still a dream.

On this World AIDS day 2009 we are excited to launch our newest project…. 3100 dinners for Swaziland.

http://possibledreamsinternational.org/3100-dinners-for-swaziland/

Whomever you are, we humbly invite you to be part of our possible dream for this world,

In peace,

Maithri

Below is a letter I wrote from Swaziland this year….

Siteki, Swaziland
4:30 pm 7/04/09

The world is full of tears.

Tears that would overflow the banks of any sea.

And yet I still believe in us. In humanity. In the power of love.

It has only been two days since I’ve been back on Swazi soil… The red dust is burning my eyes as I write these words at the ‘veterinary clinic’ which doubles as an internet cafe.

Each morning i spend an hour in clinic, before heading out into the communities to meet the people….

In every hut there is a story of sorrow.

Yesterday we drove up the most inhospitable hill…. Where there was a single hut perched upon rock after jagged rock.

In the hut we found a man with end stage HIV. He was lying naked in his bed, next to a pool of his own wastes.

Every bone in his body, literally every bone was palpable, visible. He had suffered a stroke secondary to complications of HIV/Toxoplasmosis and was unable to move his left side.

One of the wonderful Swazi nurses in the team explained that he had a caring daughter who washed him and fed him each day, but was only able to visit him once a day.

I cant remember a time ive seen someone so hungry.

We gave him an orange. He took it in his skeletal hands and devoured it.

We took out a bag of corn meal and the nurses mixed it with some milk into a paste.

He ate it faster than anything i’ve ever seen.

He held his hands in prayer and through wide brown eyes filled with tears said “Siyabonga” – Thank you.


There is a story of a sparrow, which my Dad told me once.

He was lying on a gravel road, with his little scrawny legs facing the open sky.

A horseman was walking past and seeing the sparrow, alighted from his horse.

He said “Little Sparrow, are you hurt? Why are lying there so awkwardly? Face up to the sky?”

The sparrow said “I have heard, that sometime today the sky will fall.”

The horseman laughed and said “And you think you can keep it from falling with those little legs?”

The sparrow shrugged his shoulders and said “My friend, I will do what I can.”

And that is all I am doing. What we are all doing here in this beautiful, little hamlet so filled with pain.

What we can.

From Siteki with love,

Maithri

I recently read an article about a black South African woman who was running an orphanage for children whose parents had fallen victim to HIV/AIDS. She was being interviewed for a television program and the interviewer asked her about her hopes and dreams in life – what she felt she wanted to achieve. She pondered this question for a few moments and said simply, “I want to have spent everything I have. When I meet my maker,” she added, “I want to have used up, totally and completely, every gift I have been given. I want to return to God empty-handed. When I have spent all God gave me, then I’ll be ready to go home.”

 The gift of empty-handedness is the gift that was passed on to me in my time in Swaziland. I had come to do, to teach, to share my professional skills, which I did. But what came back to me took me by such surprise. Each day hands reached out to me – to touch, to hold, to embrace, to share. They were emptied to enrich my life, to make me whole, to heal, and in so doing to make the world a more human, compassionate place. In their smallness, in their poverty, in their bare feet and AIDS racked bodies, the Swazis had mastered the gift of empty -handedness, of spending their gifts for others, of reminding me that the Kingdom of God is among us.

Sister Maureen McCarthy

An email home during November 2006:

In the midst of the struggle and heartbreak, a few shining lights of hope and renewal persist through the despair to pave the road for the orphans and vulnerable children of Swaziland….this is one of those stories:

My Sisi (sister) Nonhle (around 45 years old) is the mother of two daughters: one daughter has been “late (deceased)” for 2 years due to AIDS and AIDS related diseases and her other daughter, Nothando, has shown medical symptoms of HIV but is too afraid to get tested . Sisi Nonhle currently cares for her four grandchildren: Nomsa, Nomfundo, Albertina, and baby Sihle.

Sisi Nonhle lives on her family homestead (Ekhaya KaMatse) in a rural village in the northern part of Swaziland ’s HhoHho Region. There is no electricity or running tap inside the house; they fetch their water in 25-liter water jugs from a community tap near the top of the dirt road leading down to the homestead. Although her two sisters (one with electricity and 2 taps in her house) and their children also live on the homestead (in separate huts), they all cook, clean, harvest, wash and pay for daily living expenses independently of each other.

Nonhle previously worked in the textile mills in southern Swaziland but became too weak and sick from HIV/AIDS and eventually had to quite and move back to her family homestead. Over the last year of knowing each other I’ve watched her ankles, wrists and health deteriorate-but not her drive to live.

 When Nonhle first tested for HIV, one year ago, her CD4 (the “soldiers” who help fight off the HI-Virus) count was at a mere 64-she was literally “knocking at deaths door” (a commonly used expression in Swaziland). Sisi Nonhle is not the first of her brothers and sisters to test positive for HIV and decided to follow in their footsteps to not sit back and let the disease break her. She instantly became actively involved in helping to found SWANEPA (a Swaziland umbrella organization for HIV/AIDS support groups) and is very open about discussing her HIV status with community members and family members to educate them about the importance of testing.

 She was tested again 3 months later and her CD4 count had risen to 81, progress in the right direction but still at a deadly low level. She phoned me last week, stating that she can no longer eat and has lost 5kg (about 11 pound) in the last month. Wasting away is commonly what happens to HIV patients as they progress into AIDS and draw closer to death. During her last months ARV pickup, the hospital decided to administer another CD4 test (blood must be sent away to the capital in Mbabane and returns two weeks later).

Six months ago, while visiting the Matse homestead, Sisi Nonhle mentioned that she has received land from the Chief to start a sewing project and teach the local disabled community members. I assisted Sisi Nonhle with writing a proposal (to an organization similar to Possible Dreams International) and she received money to purchase a sewing machine and the necessary start-up supplies. Over the last few months she has sewn countless curtain/bathroom sets and actually feeling good about having a pseudo income.

 She recently had an interview to become the head seamstress for the school uniforms for a local primary school. I decided to meet Sisi Nonhle at the local hospital to get an updated CD4 count and hopefully find out that her recent loss of appetite was due to an amoeba or parasite and not a result of AIDS. At 2:00pm we lined up with the 60 plus other people waiting outside in the hot summer sun at the VCT (voluntary counseling and testing center) to get our results, and if lucky, to see an actual doctor.

We took our ripped up piece of cardboard that had the number 98 scratched on it (they had just called number 60) and sat down next to the bee-infested trashcan for some shade to eat our rice and cabbage. We were surprisingly let in an hour later. The initial nurse who took Sisi Nonhle’s weight and vital signs wouldn’t even speak to her and asked me in front of her if “she is retarded, does she have mental problems” with which Nonhle simply looked down in the indirect Swazi way and took the badgering.

Another hour past and the doctor (who recognized me from a previous visit to get Albertina tested) came back from tea break and invited us into his room. Nurses and confused patients were shuffled in and out, confidentiality wasn’t an option. Again, the doctor only spoke about Sisi Nonhle to me and asked me her symptoms with which he replied, “THOSE people” and “probably just one of those things you get from THAT virus.”

After much paper shuffling and my persistence, the nurse handed us the fateful piece of paper that had some magic number next to it which would tell us Sisi Nonhle’s progress or decline, all I could think about was the fate of the four children she cares for. After a deep breath the weight was lifted when our doctor friend told us Sisi Nonhle’s CD4 count has risen to 130! ‘It’s not perfect by any means yet but it shows that she is responding to the medication positively.’ We were both overjoyed and in an unswazi-like sweep of happy emotion she hugged me in the doctor’s office.

 That afternoon we received word that the school she had previously interviewed with was so impressed by her sewing abilities they offered her the fulltime position to be the head seamstress to sew all of the uniforms (pants, shirts, skirts etc) for the local Central School.

 Her eyes welled up with tears and she turned to me with a sigh of relief and soft look on her face that hinted that everything just might be ok after all. We set up a meeting time for next week to design the school logo for the front of the shirts, incorporating both of our initials.

Not only is her health improving daily but she now has a paying job to support both herself and her 4 grandchildren with transport, food, and school fees.

It’s a Happy Thanksgiving in Swaziland .

Jacque

I was in swaziland in 2005/2006 working on a project to improve antiretroviral uptake and compliance. There are several memories that stick in my mind and make me well up, but make me driven to want to do more in Swaziland.

I only went out with the Home Based Care team once maybe twice during the 2005/2006 period, but these visits were the ones that stay with me the most.

There was this woman who seemed to have a home of stray children who had lost their entire family mostly from AIDS but other illnesses too. I cant remember how many small children under the age of ten popped up when our truck pulled into the drive. I think it was well over 11 from the number that i saw.

We were delivering food to them, and thanks to the kind thoughts of Ron and Kathleen we also carried hard boiled eggs, we started to hand these out to the children. Now, i have experience with children in the UK, i have little cousins who were always sweet and nice children, but when it came to food or treats they would take a portion and ask for more, gobble it down and probably get a little bit on their clothes. But what struck me about the children at this home, is that they were raising each other, they quietly came to van and slowly took the egg in both hands, instead of tearing into it as i would expect, as i knew these children were hungry, they sat quietly and slowly ate the egg, i expected them to come asking for seconds or thirds, but they were happy that they had recieved anything at all. Two children asked for another egg, but not for themselves it was for smaller children who they then helped eat the egg. I have never been so taken back about about such group support in such very small children.

Thats the Beauty of PDI, we working right at the heart of the need, all our funds go straight to that child who was too small to approach the truck and finding and supporting those families who take in other children

Liann

Tiny Philiswa Maziya is a patient on the Pediatric Ward at Good Shepherd Hospital. Philiswa was born 3 months ago weighing a little over seven pounds. Since that time both her parent have died of AIDS and she has been chronically ill. A loving and attentive Gogo (grandmother) now cares for her, a not uncommon experience in a country where 56% of women in the 25-29 year age group are HIV+. Gogo Maziya and her family are part of the 77% rural based population in Swaziland depending on rivers and unprotected wells as the main source of household water, the cause of Philiswa’s chronic and increasingly life-threatening illness.

Because breast milk is not available to her, Philiswa has been fed from unsterilized bottles, using milk powder, which has been over diluted with unsafe water. She has had diarrhea for many days. On Feb.13 she is admitted with severe malnutrition, wasting and dehydration, weighing 4.8 pounds, a significant drop from her birth weight. Children under four years of age must have a caretaker with them at all times, so Gogo Maziya must now leave the rest of the family to attend to Philiswa in the hospital. An IV drip is inserted to replace needed fluids, and because the baby is so weak that she cannot feed adequately on her own, a feeding tube is placed. Gogo Maziya learns to measure the milk mixture into a clean cup and dilute it with boiled water. Using a clean syringe she carefully inserts the milk with added micronutrients through the feeding tube in the hopes of coaxing this little one back to health. Gogo has learned to do this from Dr. Joyce Mareverwa, a pediatrician from Zimbabwe. Before Dr. Joyce came, GSH had no pediatrician. Since her arrival she has filled the pediatric ward with critically ill children – TB, malaria, HIV/AIDS, wasting and malnutrition. Because she is African herself, Dr.. Joyce knows well these diseases. She has gained the affection of her young patients and the confidence of their caretakers.

Dr. Joyce nurtures and nourishes many of these children back to life with her heart as much as with her medical knowledge. Now she turns her attention to Philiswa and the difficult work of saving her life.

In Swaziland, only 33% of the rural population has access to a clean water supply. This lack of potable water is the chief cause of the high rate of infant mortality in the country from diarrhea, malnutrition and infectious diseases. Gogo Maziya and her family are part of this statistic. They live in a homestead in the Makehewu Community, an area not far from the hospital. There are over 800 households there, each family living in a one room, thatched roof house, without electricity or running water. There is only one water source for the community, which must serve them for bathing, cooking, drinking, laundry and crop irrigation. Women and girls spend an inordinate amount of time fetching water, often walking 3-5 miles, collecting it in large containers, which are then transported home in wheelbarrows or carried on their heads. It is from this water source that Philiswa was fed.

Every year 1.8 million people die from diarrheal diseases, 90% of them children under the age of 5. I begin to worry for Philiswa. She has done well the first 5 days after admission, raising her weight from 2.2 to 2.8 kilograms. On Feb. 19, day 6 of admission, however, she has started having diarrhea again and has begun to lose weight. Despite the feeding and medication, the diarrhea continues.

The next day, Feb. 21, I am shocked at the rapid change in her little body. . She is now severely dehydrated, clearly in distress. The soft spot on the top of her head is sunken in from lack of fluid, and her little heart is racing madly in an attempt to meet the demands of her stressed body. Gogo Maziya does her best to comfort Philiswa, but she too is feeling the urgency of the situation and her concern is evident.On Feb. 22, as I make my daily visit, I see Gogo gently rocking the fragile little body in her arms. The feeding tube has been removed from her nose and the IV drip from her tiny arm. For the first time she looks like just a baby. And I realize that even Dr. Joyce, with her medical magic and caring heart, could not keep Philiswa from becoming one of the 1.8 million lost to this preventable disease.

I have read that it would take the equivalent of 1% of the world’s military expenditure to provide safe water and decent sanitation facilities for all human beings. How do we measure a life?
I sit on the bed with Gogo Maziya for a while, not saying much, our shoulders touching. She asks me if she can have some of the photos I’ve taken of Philiswa, and I say yes, I will send them to her. Her grief is deep but restrained. She is a strong woman. She has buried her children; now she will bury her grandchildren.

I look at the still, small body, still swathed in blankets and words of Isaiah, which I happened upon, come to mind:

In my pastures the poor shall eat and the needy lie down in safety.

Rest peacefully, Philiswa.

You are safe now, little one. You are safe.

Sister Maureen McCarthy