YOUR SUPPORT WILL PREVENT WOMEN WITH HIV FROM DYING & LEAVING THEIR CHILDREN ORPHANS IN A VILLAGE WITH NO ORPHANAGES WHERE CHILDREN ARE DEPENDENT UPON LUCK FOR SURVIVAL.A donation, fundraising or a Standing Order of £5 a month can help CDUK to provide a food programme at the school to feed 150 children a day with the only meal they have. Your donation could provide much neded sewing machines so that more women can be taught to sew and make a living to support their children.In a rural area of Eastern Rwanda in Gatsibo Province is a Church supporting many poor villagers of different faiths including 100's of
women with HIV who are dying because they have no food to take with their free medication, Ros - our Chairman, met 70 women during her research visit in March 2020. The women had HIV due to the legacy of the Genocide of 1994.
A Pastor at the Church had formed an HIV support group, the woman told Ros that there were many more women who could not attend nor could their children go to the school as they were too ill to travel & had no decent clothes & were ashamed.
Some of the women who work on the land tried to help the others & said that they saved a tiny amount each week for coffins so that they could be decently buried. This is their immediate future without food or work as they are
unable to take their medication without eating, so they know that if they go hungry, they will die very soon & their children will have to fend for themselves.
CDUK were committed to provide a sewing workshop/cooperative for these women so that they are able to make & sell clothes at the market, provide food for themselves &their families & survive.
IN MARCH 2023 CDUK BUILT A SEWING COOPERATIVE AS WE HAD PROMISED BUT we could only afford 4 machines and need 6 more for the 100's of women who want to learn to save their lives and live to support their children. Can you help?We run the workshop using solar power to reduce the impact on the environment & overhead costs of maintaining the project. We will be planting fruit trees around the building for shade & sustenance.
CAN YOU DONATE TO BUY A TREE?We hope the HIV mothers will not need the coffins so soon as they will be able to eat, take their medication, earn a living & look after their children safely. Please help us to achieve this goal.
In 2020 the Church also hosted a school with
a food programme where more than 150 children received a daily meal & often, that was all the children had to eat in a week. At least 60 of the children attended school free because they were orphans or had mothers with HIV, who were unable to get work as no one would work with them & so they & their children went hungry due to lack of income & the mothers soon died leaving orphans.
There are no orphanages in this area and orphans have to depend upon the food programme at the Church or the good will of a poor rural community.
Go to our page to make a standing order of £5 a month, we only need 100 generous people to start the programme again!In the summer of 2020
CDUK provided the Church School with two water harvesting tanks to support the Church Food Programme & supply clean water for food preparation & better hygiene. Many thousands of young children a year die as a result of polluted water. Previously the Church collected fresh water in tanks by bike from many miles away for cooking & used rain water from muddy puddles or polluted streams for washing.
CDUK wants to
sink a well near the Church for village use by people of all faiths. Currently the only clean water has to be collected & paid for at a
government water source seven miles away at approximately the equivalent of one penny per litre
Volunteers have been making dresses for the girls from unwanted
pillow cases and Bermuda shorts for the boys from recycled materials, they have held fundraising events to raise the money for postage to the project.
For more information on dress & shorts patterns & how you can get involved go to
our page on Pillowcase Dresses. People are also being asked to donate good quality unwanted duvets & sheets to send out to the sewing workshop as
Sewing Strips so that the women who are learning to sew can practice on less expensive materials. Send them in maximum 2 kilo packs, see separate pages for more details.
Watch a video
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ixTGbzjWPP6N250ob13AvgP8H5YC3AOj/view?usp=sharing 
