Your Stories

Reports of Andrew Plant as he travels with Dr. Sue Wilson and two of her colleagues from the Tumaini Fund:

Monday 6th February

Adrian Gidney spoke to Andrew Plant about his journey so far live on BBC Radio Guernsey at 8.40am (10.40am in Tanzania).

What’s been happening over the weekend?

Well you left us on Friday, I think we were making our way across the country. Well that was quite hairy, we were supposed to pick up an armed policeman to take us across the road but we couldn’t find one. That is very much Tanzania all over, things are quite difficult to achieve. So we made the journey without the armed guard and thankfully we got here in one piece.

So what we’ve been doing all weekend is going round and seeing in various villages how AIDS has affected them and what we’re seeing is quite something.

You can see that there are old people, (everyone over the age of 40 you can class as old over here, the life expectancy doesn’t go above 55) and then there’s lots of young people, lots of children, but between the ages of about 25 and 40 there really is no-body.

Instead of the pyramid of ages that you would normally see in our society, what we’re seeing is an hourglass shape of ages; the very old are looking after the very young and that’s the same whichever village we’re going to.

Just to give you an example; yesterday we went to one place and met a guy called Nelson. He’s someone the Tumaini appeal got in touch with last year and when they found him, he and his three children were living in what is basically a pig sty, that’s not like a pig sty, that is actually a pig sty.

It had a dirt floor and walls of cloth, but cloth that we probably would not even use to wash our dishes with, it was not a pleasant sight.

The mother had died of AIDS and the Father is HIV positive now and is not a well man at all. He’s also an alcoholic and so the oldest girl in the family who’s 16 (but looks somewhere around the age of 12) had been looking after her three younger siblings. But that’s a success story; now when we go there, there’s a mud brick house, much bigger and much better than the house they were living in before. We are seeing some of the work that Tumaini has actually achieved in this area.

So what are you going to be doing today?

Well, today, we are visiting a church building and I think it’s been paid for by the people who go to church in St Saviours. I should make it clear that this is separate from the Tumaini Fund for orphans and widows, I think that Dr Wilson is very conscious that some people who donate to the fund don’t want to be spending their money on repairing churches. This is a separate thing which we are doing today, but it is another one of Susan’s projects. They’ve rebuilt a church that was falling down and we are going to take some pictures and I think she is going to take them back to show the people who have donated in Guernsey.

Now it does sound like there are a lot of problems in the country, aside from the Tumaini fund what other help is available to these people?

Well not a lot. I think something really illustrates how difficult the Government can make things for people over here. You’ve got to respect the Government because they are trying to improve the infrastructure but the way they’re doing it is not the best way as far as I can see.

There’s a lot of buildings that are close to the side of the dirt track we’ve been coming down all morning and they’ve all got a big red cross painted on the outside of them. I’ve just learnt about an hour ago, the cross means that they are up for demolition because they are too close to the road. But there’s no compensation for these people, there’s no rebuilding of houses, they’re not being moved somewhere else, they're just losing their houses. There’s no timeframe for them to do that, it seems that the Government thinks that they’ve got enough money to build the road.

On the one hand they’re trying to make the infrastructure better for people, on the other hand its making people homeless and that’s the sort of thing we’re seeing all over the place; administrative problems that are largely non-sensical.

Listen in

The journey will be covered on BBC Radio Guernsey on Morning Report each day between 30th January and 9th February at 8.40am and you'll be able to read a diary account here.