ACET Zimbabwe - Matilda Project

The Matilda Project is a partnership between ACET Ireland, the Salvation Army and several orphan and community care programmes in rural Zimbabwe.Villagers are organised into volunteer teams with basic training to help the sick, dying, bereaved and orphaned, in a country where food is scarce and medicines almost impossible to obtain. It costs just £1 a month to ensure an orphan has enough to eat, and a similar amount to pay a month’s school fees. In Tshelanyemba the Orphan Care Programme has 2,432 orphans registered. The team is based at a Salvation Army hospital - in a rural area, 157 km south of Bulawayo. In addition, 300 volunteers are looking after more than 200 sick people, half of whom cannot get out of bed. 70% of adults are women or old men – most young men have slipped across the nearby Botswana and South African borders to find work. Masiye is a Salvation Army orphan training camp, located in the more arid south-west of Zimbabwe, badly affected by famine since 2002.The Home Based Care team was set up in 2001 with 120 volunteers looking after 220 people from 5 villages, each with up to 3,000 people. Because of severe food shortages the team also provides food packs to families of 800 orphans who are currently cared for in child-headed families or fostered by a grandparent or other relative. Also provided is a porridge breakfast for the 410 children at Lushumbe Primary School. Glendale, north of Harare is the location of Howard Hospital – also run by the Salvation Army serving a population of almost 250,000 in 35 villages. 500 volunteers are supporting 4,500 very sick men, women and children at home with AIDS. The Matilda Project is also looking to develop micro-finance schemes to help older orphans become self-sufficient with their own businesses.

MILLIONS IN AFRICA ATTEND AN AIDS
FUNERAL AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH

Here is an unedited extract from Willard Ndlovu’s report on the school:

About the 70 students, we have two that have not manage to attend school, one is because of his health. He is always sick, each time the teachers have a problem that they end up sending him back home. I am planning to take him to the doctor and really find out what his problem is. The other one is just hostile ,she does not want to go to school, and we failed to convince her,. The Teachers ,parents and community leaders are so thankful to the programme, they really appreciate children going back to school. Some of the children are so intelligent that we do not doubt their future. It also helps and keep these children busy and by that they would not be involved in a lot of mischievous at an early stage which prevent them from the risk of HIV/AIDS. I will try probable to send their midyear results to you by post, to see how they are performing at school.

Report from Willard Ndlovu, Programme Administrator, reported o

ZIMBABWE

*Population: 11.7 million (World Food Programme)

*Life expectancy: 37 years (WFP)

*People living on less than US$2 per day: 83% (WFP)

*38% of population undernourished (WFP)

*Inflation is over 1200% (Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe)

*Over 15s infected with HIV: 21% (UNGASS)

*Av. no. of deaths from AIDS per day in 2005: 383 (UNGASS)

*AIDS orphans: estimated at 1.3 million, more than 1 in 3 children (WFP)

*Formal unemployment estimated at 80% (Amnesty)

*Nearly 75% of people who care for orphans are women over 60 (WFP)

As well as the AIDS crisis and the collapse of the economy, many Zimbabweans are still suffering from the effects of Mugabe’s “clean-up” operation last year where the UN estimates 700,000 people had their homes destroyed and more than 97,000 people lost their primary source of livelihood.

Both secondary schools attended by the students we support are located in the Matopas hills south of Bulawayo. Silozwe is inside the National Park area and Gulati is on the northern edge of the park; see blue star on map. Green star = Howard Hospital. Red star = Tshelanyemba Hospital. Yellow star = Nehemiah Project.