Below the article there are excerpts from an interview given by Jeff after his trip to Tanzania last year.
Steve Truelove pictured with some of the kids.
Only Half a World Away...Thirty six hours of travel and secondary school principals, Steve Truelove and Jeff Kawzenuk arrived in Malawi, the world’s fourth poorest country. Having worked in Tanzania for the past 4 years and sharing their story of hope with school communities within Kawartha Pine Ridge DSB, nearly 100,000 dollars have been raised for HIV/AIDS orphans.
In 2009, the journey of hope took them to Malawi.
The AIDS epidemic is responsible for eight deaths every hour in Malawi. Of the thirteen million people living in Malawi, there are 1 million HIV positive people and 1 million orphans.
The area they are working in has a 30% HIV rate - the poverty here is overwhelming as is the number of orphaned children.
The present government has established freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners and a more liberal climate in which AIDS education can be carried on without fear of persecution.
Steve and Jeff believe that every child has the right to an education - for it is through education that students acquire knowledge that leads to understanding and freedom.
Imagine the worst place you have ever seen in terms of the human condition, then magnify it - and you would be in Malawi.
Hello from Malawi,
Well, we have been working extremely hard and we are accomplishing great things. We have been working at a rural school about an hour from Zomba.
The poverty is unbelievable as well as the number of orphans. Poverty, famine and AIDS are rampant.
Excerpts from 2008 -
Why does a person spend time in a remote rural village in Tanzania moderating the suffering of a few people when there are literally millions in similar conditions?
Colborne resident and Cobourg District Collegiate West secondary school principal Jeff Kawzenuk faced that question as he worked in the Catholic village of Kilema, Tanzania. The answer was a painful one.
There is so much suffering and the people have so little. Thousands and thousands of the children are orphans, their parents taken from them in the AIDS pandemic. How can this happen in our world? How can so many need so much?
While the global questions remain unanswered, Mr. Kawzenuk knows now: you have to start somewhere, helping a few kids. He is firm in his belief that every child has the right to food, drink, proper nutrition and an education. All are problems the world could solve tomorrow if the will was there. And everyone has the right to die in dignity. No one in their final hours should have to endure the agony and squalor he witnessed, he believes.
A life-changing experience
He returned in 2008, convinced he had gained more than he gave. In the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro where he worked, over 100,000 people live with no hydro, no refrigeration and no clean water. Infrastructure as we know it is almost non-existent. Barely passable roads, primitive health care and limited education inhibit any movement toward a subsistence lifestyle.
One in four mosquitoes carries malaria. Kindergarten children whose parents can afford the $250 a year to attend school walk eight miles up and down the foothills to school each day. The school of 350 is served by two outdoor toilet pits.
Lunch is an unpalatable mix of rice and beans cooked over an open fire in an unventilated cookhouse. When lunch is done, the kids rinse their bowls in the creek and then fill them up to drink.
Painkillers don't exist. Women requiring Caesarian sections endure them with no morphine. People in need of a doctor walk to the village and line up for four hours in the early morning in the hope of seeing one. AIDS has eliminated almost everyone between 25 and 45. It is a generation wiped out.
The orphans of the dead have no chance to improve themselves without sponsors to pay the $250 school fees. With school comes a daily lunch - a necessity for the orphans fortunate enough to attend. The prospects are grim - and this is in an area receiving assistance from the Canada Africa Community Health Alliance.
The village of Kilema set up by the Catholic Church is small, but over 100,000 live in the nearby bush in crushing poverty. There are four primary schools, a secondary school and a vocational school to serve their children. But the vocational school has four sewing machines and 40 students.
AIDS
The effects of AIDS in Africa are gripping. Grandparents care for parentless children. One toddler he met last year was being cared for by his great, great grandparents. The baby's mother was 14 and left soon after bearing the child. Her parents and grandparents were dead or gone. Mr. Kawzenuk stopped to talk to the great great grandfather. His wife wasn't available - she was out working.
Malnutrition brings with it assorted complications. Legs break easily. In his rounds at the hospital Jeff saw a patient in traction - a couple of sticks to prop up the leg weighted down by a bag of dirt and held by twine. The night air was perforated by the screams of the sick and the dying.
Before he went to Tanzania, Mr. Kawzenuk did not understand why AIDS could not be prevented. He can rhyme off the list of reasons now - infrastructure, education, economy, healthcare.
The problems he witnessed were so vast and complex. He got the message. "I don't have the answers. They need so much," Mr. Kawzenuk acknowledged.
His experiences and those of Steve Truelove will be incorporated into the character education programs they offer at their schools. "We have so much to be grateful for. So many have so little. We can help and be aware. We can support others in so many ways. Poverty is awful. There is no dignity dying of AIDS," Mr. Kawzenuk says. If Canadian kids can understand these things, he feels there is hope: "It's a start."
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