Category: Kenya 2022
Danso Widows Living with AIDS
DANSO is an acronym for “Dandora Aids Network Support Organization”. Today we spent the whole day with this lovely group of widows. There were 180 widows in the room and many of them told stories of their desperate times during the last 3 years of the COVID crisis. Everything shut down in the first two years. People with AIDS were warned that they especially needed to isolate and were made to believe they would die if they contracted the disease, but actually they only lost 1 during the whole time! PTL People were unable to work. You may remember that for a 6 month period WorldCOMP provided food bags to over 100 widows every week to keep them from starving. Truth be told, we were worried that this group would have to disband because things were so hard, but to our delight and surprise the group has more than tripled in size from around 40 to 120 members. A part of the reason is the fact that a local church, called Dandora Cathedral allowed DANSO to have a meeting in their beautiful facility and then displayed remarkable love by opening their facility to them to use as needed. As I was thanking the church staff for opening their church to DANSO I choked up and I’ll tell you why; in a previous discussion Deborah had asked Henry Okumo (Our DANSO leader) if people living with AIDS were still stigmatized in the culture and Henry said; “Oh Yes! They are especially stigmatized in the churches”. People are afraid of AIDS so they don’t want them around. The terrible thing is that widows are also shunned by the culture and the churches because they are perceived to be especially needy and to be beggars.
For us, DANSO is especially dear to our hearts because this is where we started back in 2006. Osborn literally became a father to this group while he was still in college working on a degree in sociology and Valerie and I became involved through him.
Our very first medical camp was in Dandora in 2010 and this group served as counsellors to people who were testing positive for AIDS. One brother, named Lucas, came forward with a testimony about our Medical Camp in 2010. He said he attended the camp because he had a goiter on his neck that had grown to an enormous size over a 10 year period. He came into the prayer room where Valerie was praying for people from 9am to 6 pm and when she laid hands on him and prayed the goiter immediately began to shrink and it has completely gone now for the past 12 years.
We spent the whole day in worship and I shared with them a message of faith. Then had a powerful time of prayer. As we closed the meeting we gave every widow a large food bag weighing about 25 pounds for which they were extremely grateful. We had purchase 100 food bags, but in the end, we were 84 bags short, so we quickly sent our entire team out with all of our vehicles to purchase food for the rest.
As in previous visits to Kenya, we end up spending a lot of money because the needs are enormous here! So, if anyone is in a position to part with some money at this time I would be very grateful.
For us, DANSO is especially dear to our hearts because this is where we started back in 2006. Osborn literally became a father to this group while he was still in college working on a degree in sociology and Valerie and I became involved through him.
Our very first medical camp was in Dandora in 2010 and this group served as counsellors to people who were testing positive for AIDS. One brother, named Lucas, came forward with a testimony about our Medical Camp in 2010. He said he attended the camp because he had a goiter on his neck that had grown to an enormous size over a 10 year period. He came into the prayer room where Valerie was praying for people from 9am to 6 pm and when she laid hands on him and prayed the goiter immediately began to shrink and it has completely gone now for the past 12 years.
We spent the whole day in worship and I shared with them a message of faith. Then had a powerful time of prayer. As we closed the meeting we gave every widow a large food bag weighing about 25 pounds for which they were extremely grateful. We had purchase 100 food bags, but in the end, we were 84 bags short, so we quickly sent our entire team out with all of our vehicles to purchase food for the rest.
As in previous visits to Kenya, we end up spending a lot of money because the needs are enormous here! So, if anyone is in a position to part with some money at this time I would be very grateful.