‘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.
Familia Moja Community Project 