Inside the FSP: The Important Role of Reviews and Assessments
Mark arrived home from his recent quarterly trip to Cambodia on March 13, where he had spent a week reviewing our programs, including the AIDS Patient Family Support Program ( FSP) , which helps indigent families impacted by extreme poverty and HIV/AIDS.
From the beginning of our FSP in 2000, we have taken a long term approach to keep families together , to prevent trafficking and to keep kids in school to help to break the cycle of inherited poverty. Over the past 18 months, we have conducted an extensive and careful review of each family’s current status, stability and potential for financial independence outside our program. During that time we identified 8 families who over the past 6 to 12 months are gradually being phased out of our care.
Several families are headed by single mothers with AIDS who are now be in a position to resume independent living. These are mothers who have benefited from our support for as long 10 years and who now have raised, educated and proudly launched their children into a stable lower middle class life. Their children, now grown, are in a position to care for and support their mothers. For a few others, we felt that they should be gently moved out of our programs assistance arena over time for specific reasons. For example, one family was asked to leave due to a serious violation of our rules, by seeking support from two organizations at the same time without permission from either , or put differently, “ double dipping” . Another is a mother who was removed from our program because she ran away after stealing money from her neighbors.
We view these periodic long term assessments as a vital and natural part of the FSP. They free up scarce resources and it honors our commitment to our donors that we will carefully monitor all expenditures to be certain that funds are used, to the best of our abilities, optimally and ethically.
One of our mothers recently passed away quite unexpectedly, leaving a 12 year old daughter who was temporarily cared for by other members of the FSP while our home care coordinator worked extremely hard to find a placement in a reliable institution. We will continue to monitor her situation . One of our great successes is that our Home Care Team has worked hard from the very beginning to foster a community attitude among our families sharing scarce resources, emotional support as well as help and friendship.
Mark reviews the status of each family every quarter and any decisions that are made are implemented carefully so as not to undo what may be years of slow progress. Structure and discipline are applied with large amounts of understanding, accommodation and compassion.
We hope that this progress report has given you some insights into the operation and challenges that we face. We are grateful for your support and it is our honor to have our efforts supported by you. We could not do this without you!
Barbara & Mark Rosasco
Personal Stories from the FSP
As we look forward to the New Yeaer, it is good to look back at how we have spent our time and whether we have achieved our goals. One of our goals this past year has been to keep you, our supporters, better informed about the impact that your support makes.
Each of our FSP patient families faces unique challenges, which for most us, are not survivable. But somehow, these fragile families manage to continue one, one step at a time. Our FSP provides food, housing and social support. We are the family to these families, coping withimmediate challenges, yet working toward the longer term solutions. Sometimes the changes which we strive so hard to make, are so slow in coming that we can recognize it only in hindsight. For example, by stressing education as a core value over the years, we now have 19 FSP kids in high school. Sometimes, sadly, despite our efforts, we fail as you will read below about Daria.
We hope that sharing these personal stories will you to fully understand the impact of your support and the challenges of our task. The names have been changed for reasons of privacy.
Our deepest thanks to you all for your generous support! Your support has changed and saved many lives.
Our best wishes to you all for 2013.
Barbara & Mark Rosasco
Personal Stories from the FSP 2012
Randy ( male, age 20): Randy's mother, an FSP patient, died from AIDS about 10 years ago . Randy suffers from serious mental retardation and he has never recovered from losing his mother. He now spends his days helping his 80+ year old grandmother sell vegetables in a market stall in Phnom Penh. His 17 year old sister attends school with FSP support. Our FSP continues to help this family with food and pay rent and the education expenses of the girl. Our goal is that the girl can acquire enough education or job skills to support and care for her older brother and her aged grandmother in the future. It has been a long slow process, but without FSP support these children would have almost certainly been trafficked. Instead, we are on the edge of this fragile family achieving financial independence within the next few years.
Mike lost his brother to AIDS about ten years ago. At that time our FSP supported Mike, his brother ( the breadwinner) , their aged mother and Mike’s four children, in total, 7 people. Mike’s wife had abandoned the children to live with another man in their neighborhood. Although Mike does not have AIDS, he is mentally unstable and suffers from severe alcoholism and is often unable to care for the family. The FSP has carefully monitored the condition of Mike’s children over the years and they are all fine students. Despite the family’s poverty, Mike’s frequent mental breakdowns, his constant fight with alcoholism and the emotional scars left by their mother’s abandonment, Mike’s children have managed to survive and stay together. This fragile family and its children have been kept together because of the support of the FSP, preventing the children from a tragic life of abuse and trafficking. Instead, they are good students, in a family life and a hope for a brighter future.
Daria is a 17 year old girl. About ten years ago, Daria lived on a sidewalk in Central Phnom Penh along with her brother, their AIDS afflicted mother and their aged grandmother. We took the family into the FSP. Daria’s mother died from AIDS several years ago and since then they have relied on their grandmother and the support of our FSP. Daria’s brother is now about 20 years old and he is in grade 6 at school. Despite his very limited mental ability, the boy loves school and tries his best. He has rejected suggestions to change to a job training course. Unfortunately, Daria is a sweet girl but an indifferent student and sometimes quite careless. She doesn’t have the determination of her older brother. Recently Daria’s carelessness in missing an arranged job opportunity to provide badly needed income for the family, earned her some criticism from her brother and grandmother as well as from our program staff. To our greaty distress, Daria has now run away from home to escape any further criticism. She is now somewhere on the streets of Phnom Penh and our team is searching for her. We hope that our team or her family will find her or she will decide to come home. Phnom Penh is a dangerous place for an innocent teen and we fear for her safety . We do not want Daria to meet the tragic fate of trafficking and enslavement which awaits so many teen age runaways and orphans on the streets of Cambodia’s capital.
Your support DOES make a difference!
We are often asked how we know can tell if our programs really make a difference. Sometimes it seems that the changes are so slow as to be almost invisible.
Bit by bit, week by week, child by child, we help fragile families in our AIDS Patient Family Support Program stay together, insure that they have enough to eat, have access to medical care, and that the children are safe to survive and thrive. And, we keep the kids in school. The progress is agonizingly slow, but the wait is worth it! The combined success of these efforts goes far beyond simple survival.
This year, 2012 , we saw 5 students in our Aids Patient Family Support Program graduate from High School and enter college .We were fortunate to find sponsors for that first year's tuition. In 2013 we have 6 more students on track to graduate from High School. We have another 13 now in grades 9 through 11. This is an amazing result from a group of just 90 school age in the FSP program. We have another 4 students in a rural project in Prey Veng Province who have also just graduated from High School.
Let's put it in context: Many of the moms in our FSP program are illiterate and they do not understand the importance of education. This is where we come in. We get it! We know that just 27% of kids in Cambodia graduate from high school and only 40% of students finish middle school, so getting through grade 12 is a big accomplishment ! We have emphasized education from the beginning and now it is really beginning to show results. Yes! We are so proud of our kids! From " throw away, homeless slum kid" to high school graduate! Now onward to college student!
The academic success of our FSP students has all been made possible by the generous contributions of you, our supporters.
Now, we face a new challenge ahead: funding college . Truthfully, we never planned for it. It was not on our horizon. Yes, we thought that perhaps one or two kids might make it, but 15??
We will need to find 2013 funding for our 5 current college students , plus college funding for 6 more new high school graduates in 2013 . We also have 4 students from our Rural Assistance program ( wish serves the rural poor) who are also dreaming of attending college. From modest rural families, two new High School graduates are working construction for $ 3.00 a day to support themselves. College dreams will be lost unless we can raise funding for these and our other high school graduates.
Though costs are low - about $ 500-$800 per year for tuition and books per student and room and board for some, it adds up to a total of 15 college students in all in 2013!
We have just posted a new project # 12004 , Build Dreams! Send Cambodian Students to College which will become an ongoing program to help our high school graduates and students realize their dreams and go on to college.
What a journey: from homeless and poor in an FSP family to college student. Together, we can accomplish such amazing things and this is a wonderful example!
Thank you for making this possible for our kids! They are your kids too. Your support has gotten them this far. Let's take them the rest of the way!
Barbara & Mark Rosasco
PS. Please check with your company to see if they will match any or part of your 2012 donations.
Links:
Last week we received this email from an 8th grade student attending an international school in Asia
"I am writing a report on responses to the challenges of HIV/AIDS in Cambodia. I would like to ask one question, Of all the HIV/AIDS project how do you determine if your projects are successful and do you think that you have achieved what you set out to achieve?"
The text below is taken from our reply the student:
1) When we first started our AIDS Patients Family Support Program in 2000,
I feel confident in saying that we fully met that goal as we were able to provide adequate food support and modest housing for all of our women - most of whom had been homeless when they first entered our program.
2) After housing and food support, our "original" next most important goal for the program was
I can definitely confirm that we have met that goal as nearly all of the children in our program did enroll in school and most of them surpassed the grade level (approximately grade 6 or 7) at which poor children in Phnom Penh typically drop out of school.
Last year, for the first time, some of our students completed grade 12 and passed the rigorous examination required to receive a high school graduation certificate in Cambodia. This is a remarkable achievement for children who had formerly been homeless and destitute. Three of our FSP students are currently attending universities in Phnom Penh with sponsorship provided by our program.
This is a remarkable achievement for Cambodian children from such disadvantaged backgrounds.
3) About ten years ago the free antiretroviral medicines,provided by the U.N.'s Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria dramatically came to Camboia and increased the life expectancies of our patients.
Now, instead of fighting to keep mom's alive, our energy is to help their children succeed in school. This is a constant challenge because many of our children, having spent part of their young lives homeless and living on the streets, lack an understanding of the role which education can play in their lives. Their mothers - with some exceptions - are largely uneducated women, many of whom cannot even write their own names.Instilling in our children an appreciation for the importance of education is a constant challenge.
Despite our best efforts, we do not and cannot succeed with every child. However, most of our children are attending school and a many of them have excelled, often reaching a class ranking in the top five students in classes which typically include 40 to 50 students.
Here again, the results speak for themselves and I am confident to say that most of our kids have achieved education milestones which would have been unthinkable without the intervention of our program.
.... the work which we do brings many frustrations and disappointments but we never doubt the overall success of our efforts and the impact which those efforts continue to have toward improving the lives and future prospects of some of Cambodia's poorest and most disenfranchised people suffering from AIDS.
If you have any other questions or need additional information, please feel free to contact us.
Mark Rosasco
President, Kasumisou Foundation
Menlo Park, Ca., U.S.A.
Back to School Days at the FSP
September 2012
Mark is on his way to Cambodia tomorrow. It is “Back to School” time for the kids in the FSP. This Fall, 88 students from our FSP will return to school at the end of September . We have a record number of students in High School this year: 19 students in grades 9 ~ 12. This is wonderful! It is rare even for middle class Cambodian students to complete high school, yet we have 5 students from FSP's fragile families who are Seniors this year, on track to graduate in 2013.
I would like to introduce you to one of our High School students, Reaksmey ( pronounced res may ) . Reaksmey is 21 and she is on track to graduate in 2013. You might want to ask me what is so great about a 21 year old High School Senior??? Please, let me tell you Reaksmey’s story.
About Reaksmey- an 8 year journey to success in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
About 8 years ago, when Reaksmey was 13 , she, along with sister Melia age 5, brothers age 15 and 11 and their mother joined our FSP program. A single mother, Pich Srey Mom , had AIDS and had no money to feed her 4 kids.
The situation was dire. They lived in a little 2 room shack made of scrap wood which was shared by an uncle who was dying of AIDS. We gave Mother money for food and we paid school fees. After Uncle died, Mother became very sick, so Mother and her 4 kids moved in with an Aunt’s family. About 4 years ago, Mother had a severe stroke, leaving her paralyzed on one side. Aunt’s family could not care for her, so Mother went to live at the Home of Peace AIDS Hospice.
Although a good student, Reaksmey had to drop out of High School to care for young sister Melia. The 4 children continued to live at Aunt’s home. We paid for food for the kids and for Melia’s school costs. Elder brother soon left - he got a job working on a farm. Shortly after this, Aunt’s husband told the girls to move out. Middle brother could stay if he earned his room and board in Uncle’s tiny metal working shop.
Kasumisou Foundation Family Support Progam ( FSP) stepped in. We rent a small room for the two girls. The two girls’ entire possessions fill just a single laundry size basket. We pay for food , utilities and school fees. We provide active supervision from our Home Care Team. Reaksmey returned to high school! She is an honors student, consistently in the top 5 students in her class. She is also studying English. Reaksmey will graduate from High School in 2013! Younger sister, Melia is now 13 and also in school .
Reaksmey is grateful for all that she has. She “gives back” by working 2 to 3 half days per week as a volunteer for Kasumisou Foundation at the Phnom Penh Municipal Orphanage in the Malnutrition, Therapy and Play room where the most medically fragile children live. She holds, comforts, feeds and plays with the children, some of whom are bed bound and severely handicapped.
Now, age 21, Reaksmey’s dream is to attend college.
It’s been quite a journey for Reaksmey: from a wooden shack to honors student with a dream of college in just 8 years!
The Family Support Program’s long term approach works.
Family Support Program efforts go far beyond providing simple food and shelter. The FSP’s goal is to lift these kids out of poverty through education and social guidance, one life at a time. Your support, your commitment, is what makes this possible. With your help, we can help Reaksmey and others like her , to achieve their dreams.
Our annual budget for the FSP which serves 75 families and 125 dependent children is about $ 110,000 this year and it is challenging to raise these funds year upon year. We are grateful for donations of all sizes. It all makes a difference.
Thank you for your continued commitment. Your generous support is what makes all of this possible.
With gratitude,
Barbara and Mark Rosasco
PS Please help us to spread our story by asking your friends to link this site or our kasumisou.org website on their social networking sites.
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