Help Lesotho accelerates fight against AIDS

• December 03, 2010

By Francis Moran

Wednesday of this week marked World AIDS Day and although the pace of this pernicious destroyer of lives, families and entire national economies seems to be abating just a little, the numbers continue to be startling. More than 60 million people have contracted AIDS worldwide. The disease has killed more than 25 million. More than 14 million children in southern Africa alone have been orphaned. Nearly 35 million people around the world live with AIDS today.

The beautiful, tiny, mountainous African country of Lesotho, called “The Kingdom in the Sky” because it is the only country in the world that is entirely above 1,400 metres, is one of the hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic. Nearly one in four people in Lesotho has AIDS and, perhaps even more tragically, one in three children has been orphaned by the disease.

Some of the best work to help combat this situation has been done by a Canadian charity founded right here in Ottawa that we at inmedia have been proud to support for several years now. Help Lesotho, now nearly six years old, works at a grassroots, community-based level to tackle the pandemic with awareness, education, empowerment and practical support of the grandmothers and young people, usually young women, who have been left with the task of raising families.

For most of its six years, Help Lesotho has lived its own hand-to-mouth existence, cobbling together the resources, facilities and personnel necessary to deliver its ambitious, multi-dimensional and hugely impactful programming. For the past few years, the charity’s Lesotho headquarters has been the ramshackle little cottage you see below, with its many program directors, volunteers and participants shoe-horned into this woefully inadequate space. With its heavy emphasis on educating and empowering a new generation of young people in Lesotho who will be the catalyst for change in their own country, Help Lesotho has struggled since its earliest days to find the space to bring these young people together while the challenge of housing them for what needs to be weeks- and months-long programs is even more daunting.

All that is about to change when Help Lesotho moves into two amazing new buildings that are almost ready for occupancy in Hlotse, the administrative centre in the region of Leribe in Lesotho’s remote northwestern corner where Help Lesotho is based. (In sharp contrast to most NGOs that prefer the relative comfort of the country’s capital city.)

While in Lesotho in October, I had the privilege of seeing the new Seotlong (Sesotho for “A place to share ideas.) Centre when Help Lesotho’s resident Canadian, gender program manager Gillian Walker, was gracious enough to take time out to bring me and my wife up the road a bit to view the final frenzy of activity as the new buildings are made ready.

The building on the left is a Support Centre that will house Help Lesotho’s local staff as well as its rural outreach programs in support of grandmothers, orphans and schools. The larger Graff Leadership Centre on the right has a dormitory on the top floor that will eliminate one of the biggest hurdles faced by Help Lesotho’s most significant program by providing a comfortable and secure place to live for the 40 young women who spend their full school year taking classes and participating in a leadership program. Offices, meeting rooms and an industrial-scale kitchen occupy the lower floor.

It can be difficult for any charitable organisation to justify spending large sums on buildings rather than on human support programs. In Help Lesotho’s case, it had become impossible, even counter-productive, for the organisation to continue trying to deliver its programs out of inadequate space. These new buildings make it possible for Help Lesotho to accelerate its work, an effort that in just six short years has directly assisted tens of thousands of rural people in this beautiful but challenged country.

For the past five years at inmedia, we have opted not to send Christmas cards or baskets to our clients, suppliers and friends of the agency. Instead, we have made a cash donation to Help Lesotho, over and above the pro bono media relations work we contribute to help them get their message out. We will be doing so again this year and thank you all for your continued support of this worthwhile cause.