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Community Care Workers

These ladies rock. We have "hired" them to help us run things over on this side...but really they are volunteers who rock the world. They are only making pennies compared to what they are worth and I have grown to love them. These ladies are responsible for helping make sure our CSP runs smoothly, keeping accountability in place, visiting the kids and their care-takers. But also for the running of some our our soup clubs, passing out the donated food we get and for the daily running of the hospice care we do. I have been furthering their training in this area (they usually get it from the teams) and am so proud to say that we are almost up to seeing 70 people a week who are sick with HIV/AIDS. Yay them.

Rock it!

We met with our CCW (Community Care Workers) earlier today and discussed how we are changing up the program. Thus far, we had 4 incredible ladies working with us...busting their butts to make a difference in their communities and helping us feed kids. Now there is 8. Before, they worked doing two jobs, really; one being the Child Sponsorship Program - where we feed the kids. And the other, the hospice program...working with those who are living/struggling with HIV/AIDS (we have training for both). Since this was stretching the ladies thin - now that we are up to 135 in the Motherwell area (roughly 300 kids total) they were doing both "good" but not either one "great". So today we separated the ladies into 2 groups. 4 will do hospice and 4 will do CSP. Nosakha (No-za-key) is actually doing both, and helping manage...and that way we can rock this party to our full potential. When I talked about breaking it apart and developing the program, they started asking more questions and even giving suggestions. Yay! We did some more training as far as passing out basic medications (aspirins, daily vitamins and rash ointment) and then relationship development. This was so cool because 2 of the ladies (on their own accord) have already begun a support group in their area for PLWA (People Living With AIDS). Yay for them and for changing this corner of Africa. How stinking rad are these ladies? I am so proud of them. My favorite part of the day though was Nosakha's shirt. When I first got here, I had donated some of my clothes to her and some of her friends so I see my stuff here and there and today this 55ish year old lady had on a shirt that said "rock it" and had a cow boy riding a rocket ship. Seriously, could our life here get any better? Seriously.