Just wanted to share a really wonderful story of how Bead for Life helped one woman. Mary Naiga was a member of our Nsambya group of HIV+ women which we enrolled in 2005. I distinctly remember the first day I met Mary. I was out doing home visits with Josephine and we were in a small neighborhood and stopped near a decent looking house. Then we got out and walked around the back of the house, where we found a tiny lean-to room constructed of boards nailed together with huge gaps and mud floor covered with scraps of plastic. Inside was Mary Naiga with 2 of her four children. She was HIV+, but refused to take free ARVs because she had heard they increase your appetite and she couldn’t even feed her family one good meal a day. She would wander the neighborhood and beg her neighbors to let her wash their clothes for a few cents payment. She would also fetch water for them for 100 shillings a tub, meaning that after she paid 50 shillings for the water, she earned about 3 cents. These first two photos show Mary the day I met her. The second photo is her taken inside her “house.” Notice the gaps in the walls and how she has tried to stuff plastic bags and rags in to stop the rain. Mary enrolled in BeadforLife and worked incredibly hard to learn to roll beautiful beads. With her first earnings, she purchased matooke and meat, and couldn’t believe it when she had money left over. On her third sale, she started saving money for her children to have after she died. After a few months in the program, with a CD4 count of 150, we convinced Mary to start on ARVs. Mary heard of the chance to build a home in Friendship Village and was one of the first women to join. As the village developed, Mary quarreled with her neighbors and eventually sold her house and left, after which I lost track of her. Today, I met Mary again for the first time in 4 years. She has built a home even bigger than what she had in the village with 3 large rooms, and beautiful frame beds covered with lace bedspreads. This house sits on over an acre of land that is lush with matooke, sweet potatoes, cassava, beans, greens, yams, eggplant and maize. And this is just her kitchen garden. She also told us that she has another acre of land that she farms cash crops on to sell. She currently has 15 goats and a dozen chickens, but told us she had just sold some to pay for school. All four of her children are in school – the oldest in secondary at a very fine school near Mukono, and the two youngest at a boarding school outside of Kampala where they are receiving an outstanding education. She has been approached by a factory owner to sell her home and land, but confided to us that she would consider nothing less than 40 million shillings or about $16,000. She laughed when she showed me her kitchen – an outside room built with boards that is at least twice as big as the room she was in when I met her. Best of all, her CD4 count is now over 1000 and she is healthy and strong. At the end of our visit, she told me that when I met her, she owned a single plastic basin that she used to bathe, wash and store items. She told me that she has kept this basin for all these years as a reminder of what she has overcome. I had tears in my eyes as she gave me this old, scratched and worn basin to bring back to all of you of proof of what she has accomplished and how grateful she is to this very day, for the transformation that was possible through BeadforLife.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 04:33:13 +0000
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