Help Destitute Moms with AIDS Care for Their Kids

Mark was in Cambodia in April.  During his visit, Mark  met with and reviewed the circumstances of all of our program's  families. All of our  families in one manner or another ,  are struggling to make ends meet. The  financial reality  of our program’s limited  resources and the financial reality of each family in our circumstances requires a constant balancing act.

The families in our  program live just outside the edge of desperation  but  who, because of our program,   have a basic  economic “ survival platform”.   We urge and typically require  that the families in our program ,if they are at all capable of doing so,   find ways to earn money to supplement our support.  

The current economic boom in Phnom Penh continues to push food and rent  prices higher as land values soar, forcing unwanted change upon some of our fragile families. Here is the story of one family.

The story of “ Grandmother”

Grandmother joined our program about 16 years ago. Then at A 65, she was struggling to care for her daughter who was dying from AIDS and her two young grandchildren. Her grandson, then A 10 had mental capacity of about A 3 or A 4.   Her granddaughter was about A 7. The mother soon passed away and Grandmother continued to care for the two children. She earned some money through a tiny vegetable stall at a market near by and the family managed to survive because of the support that our program provided .

Grandmother is now A 81, her grandson A 26 and granddaughter A 22.  Sadly, little has changed. Grandmother and granddaughter  sell vegetables in the market 7 days a week. Grandmother  nets,  after expenses, about  $4 to $5 per day, which is a monthly income of $112 to $135. We provide a food allowance of $70 per month and housing assistance at $50, which gives the family at best $255 per month to support a family of 3 people.

Immense challenges face this family

Grandmother is now A 81 and  she is beginning to become a bit frail. Another challenge facing this family is the reality that the grandson, A 26, is mentally only 3 or 4 years old and he  cannot be left alone , even for short times. He accompanies his grandmother to the market every day so that she can watch over him.

Now a new and unexpected challenge faces the family. The land, where the market has been located for at least the 20 years we have been working in Cambodia, recently has been sold to a developer. This means that the market will close and those who earned their living  at market stalls like Grandmother, will be forced to relocate to survive. That is  if they can find a place and afford to move.

One possible , partial  solution

Grandmother is trying her best to come up with a way to care for her grandchildren. She  has approached us with an idea.   It seems that Grandmother has access to a tiny plot of land in the countryside about an hour’s drive from Phnom Pennh. This sort of thing is not unusual, a tiny plot big enough for a thatch shack owned by a friend or relative. The land is essentially worthless, too small to farm , but it  could provide a just enough  space to build a thatch and wood house where the family could live.  Homes  like this are often just a single large room with no plumbing or electricity. Grandmother estimates that the cost of materials and building would be about   $ 300, so she is asking us to consider advancing that money   to her to build the home.

There is a garment factory nearby this plot  of land and the idea/hope  is that the granddaughter could get a factory job with starting wage of about $ 150. This wage combined with the food support we provide of about $ 70 per month could keep  the family  on track.

Concerns

We are concerned that the costs of building the house may be higher than estimated. And of course, while we hope Grandmother can live many years longer, the reality is that there is the extremely serious  problem of how to care for the grandson when Grandmother is unable to do so. The granddaughter needs to work and so cannot stay at home . The grandson is a toddler in an adult body and cannot be left alone. Unlike the developed world, there is no social safety net to help the family. 

The reality is that we can only help this fragile family as best we can for a long as we can and we cannot see  a permanent solution. Only  time will tell what will happen.....

We remain deeply grateful to you, our wonderful donors for your kind support as we try to work to address the unique needs of each of our fragile families.

Barbara & Mark Rosasco

Life lines then ( 1998 ) and now ( 2019 ) 

When we started this work 21 years ago,  much of the center of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city, was covered by large slum neighborhoods comprised often of shacks constructed from cardboard, scrap wood and rusted sheets of corrugated metal.   Many of our earliest FSP patients and their families lived in those slums. Today, though, the city is a vast construction zone with new high rises going up in every neighborhood and construction cranes looming over the remaining slum areas.

Many of the poorest residents have been forced to relocate to areas far outside of the city center as the old slum neighborhoods were cleared to make way for new development. Some of our former patients, women whom our staff had judged to be capable of caring for themselves, were among those who moved to areas far from the city center once their support from our program was stopped. Distance and Phnom Penh’s now gridlock  traffic congestion have made it  difficult for our staff to stay in touch with those former patients who were no longer formally enrolled in our program and who, in many cases were forced to find housing far outside the city.

However , several of those patients still return regularly to the city for monitoring by the hospitals to which they were assigned for their anti-retroviral therapy and  they have re-appeared on our program radar.  In  a few cases, we have admitted a few patients  back into the Family Support Program after verifying that , without our program's support, they were struggling to survive .

In searh  of a lifeline....

Last year one woman (approximately 70 yers old) who had moved to Koh Kong province to live on her son’s tiny farm there, returned to Phnom Penh. She sought our support because life on on the farm was too tough for a 70 + year old with a fragile medical condition and the travel to Phnom Penh for bi-monthly medical checkups was more than she could handle.

In need of a lifeline....

Similarly, this month a woman who had been in our Family Support Program for many years but who had been transitioned out of the program about five years ago by our former director, sought our support again after a chance encounter with our field staff at the hospital in Phnom Penh where she gets a checkup and receives her ARV therapy every three months.   Many years ago she lost her teenage daughter to the sex industry which left her with only her son. That boy is now nineteen years old but is severely mentally impaired and he is incapable of caring for himself.

Mark met with her and her son during his February visit and decided to restart our support for them beginning  March 1. Those two cases and several others where the women or their children suffer from mental impairment or where they are otherwise unlikely to ever achieve self sufficiency are constant reminders of the ongoing need for a program like our FSP which provides for the essential living needs of some of the most destitute AIDS patients in and around Phnom Penh.  

The support of you, our generous donors, has long provided the fragile families in our program with urgentl needed humanitarian assistance and we are deeply grateful to you all for your past and continued support. 

Barbara & Mark Rosaso 

Links:

• Kasumisou Foundation website