Familia Moja Community Project

“Nasoro was one of the kindest, gentlest men I’ve ever known.”

Dr Ruth Hulser

Nasoro and Miriam at his Baptism

Nasoro was the security guard for the Diocese of Tabora and had worked for them for many years. When he reached retirement age, he was ‘pensioned-off’ as we would say in the UK, except for one small omission. No-one at the Diocese had paid any money into his pension and so, when he left, he was without any form of income to see him and his wife through their old age. Dr Ruth was far from happy with this arrangement, and so quickly employed him at the clinic as a ‘kitchen-hand’. Unfortunately, that didn’t last too long as the ladies already doing that work didn’t feel that he was up to the job. And so, Ruth employed him into her own household as a night guard but also a kitchen worker and was very satisfied with his work.

Eventually he was able to buy the piece of land next door to Ruth’s house and with Ruth’s help a small but fairly well-equipped house was built for him and Mariam his wife to live in. He became ‘part of the family’ which was Familia Moja. He was accepted into this ‘one family’ [which is what ‘familia moja’ means in Swahili] despite being a Moslem and having a Moslem wife, because FM doesn’t make distinctions like that when considering who to help. More recently, his wife started having some rather strange dreams. [And it seems that this is not entirely unusual for Moslems who God is seeking to draw to himself – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K_lou3qTCY ]. She dreamed that she was struggling to find the local mosque. Every time she tried, she was thwarted and every time she asked for help she was directed to the local church. Eventually, the couple gave in to God’s prompting and recently they were both baptized as Christians.

The relationship with the rest of their family was already difficult but now it was to become more so, as they has broken away from their Moslem roots and as such were considered outcasts as they had dishonored their family. For many Moslems who convert, this effectively becomes a death sentence as that is often considered the penalty for ‘apostacy’.  Thankfully, this wasn’t the case here as they were somewhat protected because of their involvement with ‘Dr Ruth’.

This last year Masoro died quite suddenly. It wasn’t clear quite why he died, but he left Miriam his wife in a very precarious and vulnerable situation. Traditionally, the family would turn up to claim all of the man’s possessions. This would have left Miriam completely destitute as none of them would be willing to take on an ‘apostate’ woman in order to look after her in her old age. However, when they arrived, they were told by local people that a whole lot of the things there were looking to claim couldn’t be taken. Why? Because they had been provided by ‘the doctor’ and so they belonged to Ruth. And the house [and the land it stood on] could not be claimed by them because the house was ‘the doctor’s house’. And so, after a bit of negotiation with the family, much of what Mariam would need to survive into her old age continued to be considered hers. Nasoro’s family obviously didn’t want to be very involved with their funeral and so it was Familia Moja that once again organized and provided the funeral.

But that is what you do for family. It is a long term commitment.

Will you join in that if you haven’t already done so and help provide more long-term support?

You can give using our CAFDonate secure portal which allows us to collect Gift Aid if you are a UK tax payer.

You can find this at www.cafdonate.cafonline.org/11331

A message from Dr Ruth

Please go to https://youtu.be/6XxGYA6tPbo to view this message [about 7 mins long]

Apologies for the slight lack of news since Christmas. Here are a couple of things to make uo for it!
Firstly we have a newsletter from Dr Ruth telling us some of what has been going on recently. And secondly we have a new ‘FM Short’ – a brief film telling people about the people we have been able to help. This is an update on Abdulla and Ashura [as mentioned in the newsletter below. You can access this film on YouTube at https://youtu.be/LE1cZ9zMM_k

If you wish to donate then the easiest way is via our CAF Donate page at www.cafdonate.cafonline.org/11331

The seasons are about to change in Tanzania and the rain has just started this week – but slowly as yet. Please pray that it will continue and in suitable quantities!
Last year’s water has gone in most of our ponds. October was very hot and what little water there was is now all but dried up. But in some places there was until quite recently, still enough for people to be able to grow some food. And where there is water [or the promise of water], there is work which will allow some people to earn money to allow them to feed their families. Now is the time when the fields are being prepared ready for the next year’s growing season.

The pond building work of Familia Moja and the work being done to improve the soil by making [and showing others how to make] good quality compost, has made a big difference in the lives of those who live around those ponds. And as global warming continues and famine stalks parts of Africa, the risk to the people of Tanzania increases.

One of Dr Ruth’s former guards has one of the ponds next to his home and has been able to continue to earn a small living. He has now also been able to help support one of his neighbours – a single mum living nearby with 2 children she has been struggling to feed.

Mama Ndugu – our ‘chief nurse’ – also lives next to one of the ponds. She has a garden where she is able to grow food to help feed her family and neighbours. Her garden has been doing OK, but the last crop failed to ripen properly because the water ran out. But she has continued to feed those in need around her – about 50 local children every day! She feeds them ‘rice pap’ which is a mixture of well-cooked rice and ground peanuts. She is also able to provide them with some fruit two or three times a day. Some of these children will get nothing else to eat. Food prices are rising and it is now costing about £75 a month just to buy the food. Thankfully, she has several volunteers who are working with her to collect wood for the cooking etc, so there are no other overhead costs.

Many of our ‘clients’ are receiving food aid, as many are too poor to feed their families or two old, ill or disabled to do this without help. If you wish to donate then the easiest way is via our CAF Donate page at www.cafdonate.cafonline.org/11331

‘Famoi’ [our Tanzanian partner organisation] have food [thanks to the generosity of you and other donors] but not an unlimited supply. They have enough to prevent quite a few families and individuals from starving. But if the local population think that they have food to give away or sell cheaply, they will be inundated. And the food that FMCP UK have paid for is bought on the understanding that it is for those who may have no other mechanism to support themselves of others. So how do you find those who need the help most?

The local team have thought this through and seem to have a good local answer.

A market stall run by one of our ‘clients’.

So how will that work???

The answer is all in one of the primary products being sold. The flour in the bucket is being sold at a subsidised price so it is cheap. It is wholemeal maize flour and it is used to make a sort of porridge. But being ‘wholemeal’, the meal it makes is rather bitter and unpleasant. You can survive on it, but it’s pretty gross.

So if you have a bit of money to spare you wouldn’t consider buying such a substandard product.

And there is the answer. People will only buy this to eat if they are really desperate, and so Famoi have been able to use this to identify and target those in the greatest need. Once the FMI Team know who these people are are they can contact them and start the process of befriending them and offering them assistance This is one of three stalls that Famoi have set up. And this one is being run by a lady whose life was probably saved, quite miraculously, by Familia Moja several years ago. The lady in the photo was one of the patients Dr Ruth came into contact with back in the days when she still worked as a CMS missionary at St Philips Clinic. Due to severe immune failure, this lady developed a fungal infection in her head. She was admitted in order to administer life-saving drugs, but became psychotic and tried to ‘break out’ over security fences at night. Dr Ruth had no alternative but to discharge her home immediately. The clinic had no legal power to ‘section’ her like we might here in the UK, and so there wasn’t anything they could do to keep her safe. All they could do was discharge her with pills [the oral version of the treatment that she’d been receiving by injection in hospital] and hope that she would take them, Dr Ruth expected her to die quite quickly.

Not only did she survive (and she spent some years on the farm recovering), but her daughter survives also and she has been running this stall successfully for some years making enough income to feed her family (helped with a little maize from us).

So here is a life saved, helping now to save others.

A few weeks back there was an ‘incident’ just a few doors away from the FMI office. A couple had gone to their small holding to tend their crops, leaving their teenage daughter to mind her younger sister and cook some food. While doing this, she managed to set fire to the grass roof of the outside toilet. This soon caught hold of the roof of the house, and before long the whole building was alight. I neighbour rushed into the burning property and managed to rescue the younger child just seconds before the burning roof collapsed!

Imagine returning home to this! Thankfully, the two children were safe with neighbours. But everything else [apart from a few burned bricked that could be salvaged] was gone.

Thankfully FMI was able to help by providing initially some basic supplies such as bedding, food and cooking implements. Later as the house was being repaired, they were also able to provide tarpaulin to create a temporary roof while wood and other materials could be sourced.

Without your support and donations, none of that would have been possible.

If you wish to donate then the easiest way is via our CAF Donate page at www.cafdonate.cafonline.org/11331

God blesses our small endeavours!!

You may remember from our last post that we were having an event. We did and it was a nice sunny day and several of our friends from Bunyan Baptist Church attended in the nicely refurbished building. However, on the day it felt a little bit quiet and we wondered whether all the effort had been worthwhile. BUT – when we eventually counted up the donations and sales from the event we were amazed to find that we had raised nearly £1000!!! Plus, though we hadn’t sold a great deal of the items collected for the sale, we were able to donate it to our local charity shops in the town. Staff at one of the shops not far from us were over the moon with the bags full that we were able to pass on, as their donations had begun to dry up. So they felt exceptionally blessed as well.

With donations like this FMI have been able to purchase life-saving food which will be carefully stored away ready for the day when food prices in Tabora become too great for our clients to be able to afford even the basics.

What else to report?

Well I have recently completed our annual report for the year ending 31st March 2022 and submitted our annual return to the Charity Commission.

You can read it here or download a copy to read using a pdf reader.

We are pleased once again [and are thankful to God and His people and other donors], to be able to report that despite having sent just over £16,ooo to Tanzania, we still had just over £18,000 in the bank account [£420.41 more than we spent!] at the end of that financial year. And that was in another year when Covid-19 made opportunities for fund-raising very difficult.

Since then we have made two more grants to FMI and have sent them another £19,500 in this financial year. As the price of food, fuel, and materials continues to rise, so the need increases.

Your kindness in giving like you do is restoring the lives of those who would probably almost certainly either starve to death, die of simple illnesses and infections or have no quality of life. Such is the mission of the people of God as expressed to Abraham all those centuries ago.

We have been very fortunate over the last few months and funding has just flowed in! [Thank you!] But we thought it would be good to actually have an event to raise the profile of the project in our home town of Stevenage as well as hopefully to raise some funds.
So if you are Stevenage-based or live nearby, you will be welcome to join us on Saturday 30th April at Bunyan Baptist Church from 10.00 to noon.

The last few weeks have seen much for which we can be thankful.

Christmas has truly been, and we have seen good gifts galore. The poor in the villages around Tabora have not been forgotten by you or by God.

And the greatest gift is the gift of life!

Firstly we want to thank all of you who have been so generous in providing us with the financial resources that we need to carry on this work. We are grateful both to those who give regularly and also to those who send us larger donations. Since November we have received over £14,000 in donations. Thank you to the generous donors who give regularly. Thank you to the two donors who also made personal gifts of £1000 each. And thank you for the several large donations from supporting churches in Nottingham, Yeovil and Stevenage. [I 1hope I haven’t forgotten anyone – thanks to you if I have!!]

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Your generous donations are helping the people of Tabora in many many ways! Thank you.

Over the past few years your generosity has enabled the building of numerous ponds including the two dug in 2021 – one of which was the biggest so far being twice the normal capacity. And just look how green the area is around this water source!!

We are also thankful to God for rain to fill them this year. This will hopefully provide water for about 10 months of crops in a land where there is normally only water for eight to ten weeks a year

It is planned that we will build at least two more in 2022.

Your generosity also enables us to provide food, medicine and care to over 70 clients and their families.

Here we see some the food stores bought before prices got too high and also some of our clients receiving special Christmas food parcels that supplement the normal provision.

Your generosity also enables us to support about two dozen children from our families to go to school. For this they need to have clothes, shoes and exercise books etc.

And very occasionally your generosity allows us to go the extra mile and spend a bit more on turning an individual life around.  Juma Swalehe is a 15 year old boy with a broken leg. You may have read about him if you downloaded the November newsletter.

Juma is one of four children in a single parent family. Not only does he come from a very poor family, he has also sickle cell anaemia, which makes him generally poorer health. That is why he looks so small. Miraculously he was able go to primary school. But after the last exam he broke his shin bone playing football. His mother could only pay for minimal healthcare and this open wound became infected, causing a lot of pain. The only option is an operation to remove the dead bone and replace it with an artificial section made of a special ‘bone cement’.

In the UK this would cost many thousands. In Tanzania it is much cheaper [a few hundred pounds] but also out of the reach of the family. So the wider family – Familia Moja – have stepped in and he has now had that operation and his family is being supported with extra food to aid his recovery.

These photos show him before the operation and afterwards.  We must continue to pray that he recovers properly and that the leg heals properly. But we know God can perform miracles. [At the bottom of the 15Aug20 entry of this website you will see the story of Luka – you can watch it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMacnKqgN3E ]

Thank You!

Below you will find a copy of the latest newsletter from Dr Ruth Hulser, our link between FMI and the UK. Please download a copy and read how the team on the ground are getting on and about some of the challenges that they are facing.

Advent Challenge

If you would like to donate to the work of Familia Moja this Advent Season, you may wish to download and use a resource that one of our supporters created for us. The Gift of Life Advent Calendar provides a challenge for each day.

[Members of Bunyan Baptist Church – Please note that our church has also issued a similar project for another local charity. This FMI calendar is aimed at supporters not involved with Bunyan Baptist Church. While that doesn’t mean you are prohibited from using it, we don’t wish to compete with that, especially as Bunyan’s main Christmas giving will be for FMCP-UK]

The word Gospel, when used in the Bible, is a word ‘stolen’ from the Roman Emperors. They would send out ‘proclamations’ throughout the Roman World which would often start something with the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, evangelion, meaning “good news”. For instance there is an inscription in stone recovered from an ancient Greek city in Western Turkey that uses this word to announce the birth of Augustus Ceasar. The translation is something like this:

“Since Providence, which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life, has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a savior, both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things, and since he, Caesar, by his appearance (excelled even our anticipations), surpassing all previous benefactors, and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done, and since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings [εὐαγγέλιον] for the world that came by reason of him”

The Gospel that announces Jesus is similar. Part of it is about ‘eternal life’ but much more of it is about bringing blessing to the poor and needy and health to the sick and restoration of the outcast.

Familia Moja is part of that ‘blessing for all nations’ that was promised initially through Abraham and then King David and then their descendent Jesus the Carpenter. This work is the followers of Jesus continuing that blessing.

Up until now, members of FMI – our partners in Tanzania – have been providing the service that you are supporting with little mention of the motivation and origin of the support. At one of their recent team meetings, it was felt that they should be a little more open about where the ‘blessing’ was coming from. With the blessing comes a challenge from Jesus – “Follow me”. Jesus called people to put their allegiance [trust] in him and become like him. This was no call to an intellectual acknowledgement that he existed or that what he said was good / true. This was a call to imitate him and tap into the supernatural power that God promises those who follow him. Eternal life is just the icing on the cake – not the cake itself.

A few days ago a couple who have benefitted from the work of Dr Ruth and FMI decided to very publicly announce their allegiance to Jesus [having been Muslims till now] and got baptised. N, now aged 81, has worked for Dr Ruth for over 10 years. His wife’s life was saved in a rather ‘desperate’ manner years ago by Dr Ruth.

Changing allegiance like this – from Mohammed and Allah to Jesus – is not an easy thing to do in their culture. They will no doubt meet resistance from family and friends. Please pray that God will continue to bless them and keep them safe in the knowledge that the community known as Familia Moja – ‘One Family’ – has their backs.

More need for this ‘good news’

The team have been assessing several new families.

One is a lady who had a stroke and has been bed-bound for 2 years. Her husband deserted her some time back. Her sister, who was already looking after a third sister with mental health issues and a child with severe learning difficulties, took her in. This put immense pressure on the family. This ‘carer’ was forced by her husband to go out daily to earn extra money to look after all these extra family members. But now her husband has now thrown out the whole accumulated family as he felt he could not support them anymore.

There is a 15 year old boy who suffered a fracture when playing football. Due to the unfortunate way the fracture term happened, the bone pierced the skin and he has an ongoing infection in the bone which is not healing. He was told by the local government hospital doctors that he would have to go to the zona speciality hospital in Mwanza. His mother, a single lady with four children has been earning the money by selling vegetable in the market. They cannot even afford the trip, let alone the treatment. This infection must be treated if the boy is to have any life at all. If untreated he will be disabled for the rest of his life.  FMI is trying hard to engage with the mother to find a way to access affordable treatment that will help him.

It has become very clear that over last 2 years the community around the office have struggled to cope. Food prices have increased. Some people are not eating for days at a time. And Covid-19 has added some additional economic strain with some being unable to work. Many people are suffering, and probably dying early, because they cannot afford treatment due to the economic  down-turn that has happened over the last few years. Local reports suggest that in the last 2 months about 28 people have died in Kipalapala alone (the area local to the FMI office). FMI is looking to step up to try and relieve some of this need. Please pray that they will have the capacity to do this and that God will send them the resources – people and food and medicines and funding and the necessary rain [but not too much] – to be a massive blessing to this community as we approach Christmas.