| Appeal for Donations |
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Dear Friends and Supporters of the Keiskamma Trust, We would like to appeal for your help as we are currently experiencing an extreme lack of funds. This has happened for several reasons: it is the end of our fiscal year and many of our funding contracts have come to an end, there was a lack of fund-raising done earlier last year, and we must often wait a long time between submission of proposals and response from donors. We have a number of large proposals that were written to support the health and art projects but we continue to wait for project visits and responses from funders and at present we have only enough funds to run for one month’s time. Instead we have worked hard at producing a budget that will enable us to continue to respond, albeit on a smaller level, to the AIDS crisis in our area, and save enough funds to ensure that we can continue doing so for another three months. Today we have signed contracts with all of our health staff for one month only at reduced salaries. We are cutting down on food for patients and food parcels while the demand for these remains very high. We are also cutting our petrol costs and reducing our drivers to less hours which means we will leave some patients without transportation to hospital and clinic appointments. For all of us at the Trust it is a very difficult time as we see patients begin to suffer and we contemplate a time in the near future when we will be left unable to respond at all. We also have to make changes in our art project and yesterday we held a general meeting for the art project embroiderers and told them as well that we will have to cut down on the amount of piece-work we can give them and that some of them will have to be laid-off. Many of these women are the only wage-earners in their families and though they make small amounts of money each month it is sometimes the difference between eating well or sending a child to school or not. At the same time we have been confirmed in our project’s worth as the South African Health Department has just released new guidelines urging the care and immediate treatment of children who are HIV positive, severely ill people and everyone with low CD4 counts—a major victory for the fight against AIDS—and a vindication of what our project has fought for and done in this area for nearly a decade before the government came onboard. Thanks to a new minister of health—Barbara Hogan—and to the tireless efforts of NGOs like ours we are finally changing attitudes about the urgency of treating people with HIV/AIDS. Attitudes are at last changing but treatment and access to treatment is still far behind. We need to continue our work at the frontlines of the AIDS crisis that will be with us for a generation to come and we need your help. We have proven our success in the face of tremendous odds for years, and we need to keep working to advocate on behalf of poor rural communities like ours. We have had several scholars and researchers who have visited us in the past few months and we have been confirmed that we are a model of care for rural under-resourced villages in South Africa. We have changed the face of the pandemic in our area: for example the Keiskamma Trust in conjunction with Dr Baker and Prof. Hofmeyr have brought the level of prevention of mother-to-child transmission up to be one of the highest in the country: over 90 percent of pregnant women in our distract are getting treatment, which means their children are born without HIV. Our art project continues to generate interest and kudos from around the world. Most recently the Keiskamma Altarpiece came back home to South Africa and is the centrepiece of an important exhibition in Durban called Not Alone: An International Project of Make Art/Stop Aids. Click here to read an article on the show by the Mail and Guardian. Please donate generously to help us continue our important work in the villages of Hamburg, Bodium, Ntilini and Bell and many thanks for your support in the past. Click here to choose a donation method. |