In 2008, the Diocese of North Carolina's Millennium Development Goals Subcommittee awarded global missions grants totaling $28,000. This money was divided between eight organizations whose work addresses one or more of the Goals. The recipients are:
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Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill has supported ChildReach Africa since Catherine Piwang founded the organization in 2005. Mrs. Piwang was a parishioner at Holy Family with her family in the mid-1990s before returning to Uganda. She sends the church regular reports of her organization's charitable activities.
ChildReach Africa ministers to the needs of children in war-torn northern Uganda, particularly "Child Mothers", girls as young as 10-years old who were abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to become "wives" to the soldiers, and bearing them children. For 20 years the northern part of the country has been de-stabilized by civil war and people have been forced from their villages into Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps in order to be protected from the rebel army. ChildReach Africa offers girls in the IDP camps an opportunity to generate an income by teaching them a marketable skill (sewing, crocheting, embroidering napkins, tablecloths, kitchen towels, and creating greeting cards, all to be sold in the U.S. churches at alternative Christmas markets) to support their young families. ChildReach also teaches them literacy skills through a mobile library and is now establishing a scholarship fund to enable some of the girls to get an education.
The Anna Apoko Scholarship Fund is named after the first girl in the Acholi region of Northern Uganda to obtain a college degree education in 1967. Her career culminated in 1986 with her appointment as Uganda's ambassador to Belgium. Mrs. Piwang says "By telling the girls about another Acholi girl who grew up and achieved an education and great success, we hope to instill in them a dream for better things to change their society which has been so badly wounded by war and poverty."
The cost of educating a girl as a residential student at Trinity High School in Gulu, Uganda is $400 per year. This includes tuition and boarding fees.
Catherine Piwang will send to the committee periodic reports describing how the scholarship money is spent for each child. ChildReach Africa keeps a file on each student in the scholarship program, documenting her progress in school. A ChildReach Africa representative will visit the school periodically to counsel the girls as needed and to obtain a first-hand account of the girls' progress, including a report from school officials.
To learn more, read the story of child-mother Amwony Rose.
Deacon Velinda Hardy visited Rwanda with The Forgiveness and Reconciliation Project in April and July 2008. Members of the mission team attended group meetings and developed a support relationship with the leader, Mrs. Chantal Nyiramanyanana.
The project works with women and men who have HIV or AIDS to encourage self support and independence, to reduce the stigma and discrimination experienced by members, to encourage forgiveness and reconciliation, to support micro enterprise and to offer trauma counseling to victims.
Deacon Hardy plans to visit the group in April 2009. During that visit, she plans to meet with the project leader to review how support from the Diocese of North Carolina has been implemented in the program. She also plans to meet with widows and children in different parts of Rwanda to witness first hand the work that the project provides.
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The Honduras Health Mission occurs in the Southern Highlands of Honduras in the Choluteca region. The HHM has been in existence since [the 1980s when] Bishop Robert Estill along with others from the Diocese of NC visited the region at the request of former Peace Corps worker Jeff Boyer.
The purpose was to address sustainability issues in the region and out of the trip came The United Communities. The original seven communities came together in order to promote sustainability in their region, which is composed of many small mountain villages. The United Communities and the Honduras Health Mission continue to work together.
The Diocese of NC helped the United Communities to purchase two manzanas of land in the crossroads of Madrigales. On that land has been built a classroom building, a dormitory, a kitchen building, another building which houses a small computer center and storage area. There have been building trips from the Diocese over the years 1999-2004. During the years of 1989-2000, Church of the Nativity in Raleigh, handled the administrative load and coordinated the health missions that went every other year. Since 2001, St. Stephen's in Durham, has handled the administrative load and health missions that have gone on a yearly basis.
The current project focuses on the continuing education training of the local health promoters. The Mission Statement is: The continuing task of the Honduras Health Mission of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina is to augment and improve the health of the people of the Choluteca region of Honduras in collaboration with the United Communities.
Assortments of people are taken on the mission: nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, dentist and dental assistant, gophers and interpreters.
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Health in Harmony's Mission: Health in Harmony supports an innovative program in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, that provides access to high-quality, affordable health care through partnership with local communities, integrating essential medical care with environmental protection strategies for the threatened rainforest.
Project ASRI's approach is three-fold:
Dr. Kinari Webb, the project's Director, has the guidance of the HIH Board of Directors, and is assisted in the procurement of medical equipment, fundraising, and by a domestic volunteer program that coordinates sending U.S. medical and public health professionals to consult with the Indonesian doctors providing medical care.
In July 2007 Dr. Webb was able to open "Klinik ASRI" after selecting a site, obtaining permission from many different Indonesian government levels, and conducting a baseline health and environmental awareness survey of over 1,390 individuals with the aid of 60 Indonesian nursing students. In the communities served by the clinic, the average household income is $13 per month, far below the WHO's (World Health Organization) standard for extreme poverty of $1 per day. The clinic and the communities it serves are located around the border of Gunung Palung National Park, one of the last two habitats in the world that support a breeding population of orangutans, as well as many other endangered species.
As of August 2008, Klinik ASRI has seen over 5,000 patients who are often receiving treatment for preventable, chronic illnesses that have gone untreated for years. Most of the children have never been vaccinated, and this region is a "hot spot" for malaria and TB.
Over the last year much work has been done on the environmental side, through community meetings to educate community members about the benefits of the program and to raise awareness of the need to protect the ecological diversity of the rainforest by preventing illegal logging. Community members have also come to understand the interconnection between preserving their watershed and improving community health. An incentive program is being put into place to reward villages that protect Gunung Palung National Park's rainforest, offering further discounts on the already affordable health care provided by the clinic. Patients and their families can also earn health care credits by working on ecologically friendly projects such as the organic farm and seedling nursery. The program works in partnership with the people it serves, listening to their concerns, needs and suggestions.
Online monthly newsletters report activities and successes, and the treasurer of Health in Harmony will inform how the funds are spent. Access to detailed reports by Dr. Webb will also be available.
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KIWAKKUKI is a Kiswahili acronym loosely meaning "Women Fighting Vigorously Against AIDS in The Kilimanjaro Region." It is an organization that was begun by a group of volunteers in 1994 when the theme of World AIDS Day was "Women and Girls and AIDS." The founding volunteers were all related to the health care field and had seen increasing numbers of persons who were dying of what, still to this region of Tanzania, seemed like a mysterious disease. These women recognized that the disease was not mysterious; it was AIDS. They joined together for this World AIDS Day to highlight the reality of the disease and to reduce some of the myths that had grown around the disease that was killing so many of their friends and neighbors. KIWAKKUKI's first program was Education and Outreach. There were no hard statistical indicators of the prevalence of HIV in Tanzania in 1994; however, by 2000, the Centers for Disease Control were estimating that Tanzania's HIV prevalence was between 6-8%. KIWAKKUKI's own test site has remained fairly constant at 15%, perhaps because people are believed to attend KIWAKKUKI's Voluntary Testing and Counseling (VCT) Center because of the other services that are provided, and they believe that they are at high risk of infection.
The KIWAKKUKI mission: To sensitize and educate the community in the Kilimanjaro region and facilitate the provision of services to those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS in order to control the spread of the disease and its effects.
KIWAKKUKI's orphan support program began in 2000 because staff in Education and Outreach found that as parents were dying, children were being left in the care of grandparents and other relatives. They felt that something needed to be done. With seed money from Women's Front of Norway and an individual donor from Ireland who had connections to Irish Aide, the orphans began receiving support.
Duke University's involvement started when one Duke researcher was looking for a non-governmental organization (NGO) to partner with in sever home-based care (HBC) and voluntary testing and counseling (VCT) research projects in the Kilimanjaro region. At the time, Duke was providing residents to Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC), one of four referral hospitals in the entire country, and was looking to expand research initiatives in HIV/AIDS research and care.
KIWAKKUKI currently has several areas of focus:
Grant Focus: The proposed project would specifically assist the Home Based Care (HBC) Department. With [a grant] the department would have funds for desperately needed medications not supported by the local dispensaries as well as money for the HBC volunteers, for their transportation by bus to their patients, and for cell phone scratch cards to be used to contact the KIWAKKUKI base when an emergency arises with a special needs client. The mission statement particularly references "provision of services to those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS"...This project can be seen as seed money for the department to shore up their medications and improve the quality of the HBC volunteer visits and communication with the home base at KIWAKKUKI. The funds would offer other institutions the opportunity to match the grant and thus improve the care in the region.
Goals and plan for implementation: Currently there is one nurse and two skilled outreach workers who are overseeing the project. These three paid staff persons are located in the home building of KIWAKKUKI in Moshi. In each district there is an HBC district coordinator for KIWAKKUKI who receives a small stipend. At each Ward level, there is a KIWAKKUKI volunteer HBC ward leader, and moving down, there are village leaders, street leaders and then the HBC volunteer who makes the majority of the home visits. All are volunteers with the exception of the home staff who make visits, train the volunteers and keep the medical records for the clients. Where there are needs are in the concrete provision of materials and care. Volunteers are encouraged to spend six weeks to one or more years with KIWAKKUKI, and those who have an interest in home-based care would benefit highly in being a part of this department.
The project's success will be evaluated by patient morbidity/mortality vs. improvement. Patient records are kept on all HBC clients. Each of the patients who are assisted by this grant will be recorded and information sent regarding HBC visits and medications.
A partnership, including American medical missionaries with Episcopal roots based at a hospital affiliated with the Anglican Church, working to bring hydro-electric power to impoverished, rural areas of Rwanda.
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Under the auspice of the Comprehensive Development Project, this environmental sustainability effort in the mountains of Haiti will provide trees and underplants to counter the losses caused by floods and erosion during the recent catastrophic hurricane season.
The primary school, a part of the Diocese of Belize, serves the poorest of the poor in swampy San Pedro Town. The Millennium Development Goals have become a part of the operating system and lessons at the school, which opened in 2006
