By Barbara Rosasco | Secretary & Treasurer
Our original program, the FSP ( AIDS Family Family Support Program) continues to support fragile individuals who became a part of this progranm years ago. At that beginning of the program , life expectancy ( pre AIDS drugs) was about 18 months and our initial goals were to provide humanitarian care for individuals and assistance to care for dying moms and their dependent children.
We never imagined that these many years later , more than 25 years later, that HIV/AIDS would become a chronic and debilitating serious illness . The antiretroviral drugs foor HIV / AIDS arrived on the scene in the early 1990s and by the mid-late 1990s they became a game changer, greatly extending the lifespan of individuals for those who could afford them or who through progrmas like ours, had access to them . Today, our program is a small shadow of what it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
We currently have 24 individuals, 17 adults and 7 adolescents in the program. They remain in our program because of their fragile and quite tenuous living conditions.Most of our program participants are HIV positive, a few are legacies from a mom or grandmother or children of an HIV positive mom. All have in some way experienced a loss due to illness or death related to HIV. Regardless of that, without our support they would be, at a minimum, homeless and quite possibly cruelly exploited. Our current average support per person is about $92 per month , although we would like to increase food allowances by $15 to $25 due to the impact of inflation over the past year. If you are living on $92 a month, inflation bites hard.....We currently have one young man, age 29, in our program at least 15 years,. His mother is HIV positive and currently in reasonable health and he is actively involved in her care. This young man, although not professionally assessed, is very, very low IQ. He is working as a day laborer , when possible, in the construction industry . In 2020 he had gone to a dental clinic on the Vietnam border and had a number of dental fillings. Eventually, those fillings " wore out" and failed and he began to experience infection. with a lot of pain and puss in his gums, to the point where finally in late 2025 he went to the Russian Hospital in Phnom Penh where they told him that he had a systemic infection and they pulled all of his teath with the idea that he would get dentures. However, the dentures were estimated at $400 to $500 dollars. While inexpensive by our standards, this is the equivalent to more than 2 months salary Currently our program funds are extremely low, as is typically the case after the slow summer season ends and before the the busy tourist season begins. Much of our funding comes from tourists who visit our art and music school in Phnom Penh. We are currently able to fund only essential services in all of our programs. Now, after paying required expenses, rents, food, salaries etc, our current bank balance as of today is $366. This is similar to last month when Mark and I added $ 3500 in personal funds to pay October expenses. As we had written previously, we exhausted our reserves during the COVID years and we must now function month to month.
We are committed to continuing the support of these 24 fragile individuals, all of whom would be homeless without our housing and food support. We hope that you will join us for Giving Tuesday on December 1, where donations will receive a proportional match.
This program is quietly successful in helping a small number of disadvantaged and impaired individuals to live a modest but dignified life instead of being out on the street where they would be cruelly exploited.
We are very grateful to you for your support and we hope that you will join us on or before December 1.
Thank you for all of your wonderful support over the years.
Barbara & Mark
By Barbara Rosasco | Secretary & Treasurer
By Barbara Rosasco | Secretary & Treasurer
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