Communities Without Borders

Watertown HVMA was actually the first American community to enter a partnership with a Zambian community early in the year 2000 when we agreed to support the orphans and vulnerable children in Mandevu Compound. In this year we celebrate the tenth year of this support, and by now a number of our children have successfully passed their 7^th and 9^th grade exams and are now in secondary school. This is critical to their individual livelihoods as well as to the development of their community and of Zambia as a country.

In 1999 Dr. Bail was engaged as a consultant to the Government of Zambia to estimate the costs of the Zambia National Plan for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Sexually Transmitted Diseases. Up until this time national planning had involved exclusively the government and the large donors, but for the first time Zambia engaged civil society organizations. There were some 43 non-governmental organizations whose grassroots programs were found to be acceptable for inclusion into the national plan. Dr. Bail visited most of these and came to admire the commitment and compassion which they exhibited. Having seen very successful transnational non-governmental partnerships when he was working a few years earlier in the World Health Organization, Dr. Bail decided to propose partnering American organizations with the Zambian organizations he had just visited. The first of these was the health center where he himself worked: Watertown HVMA.

After some initial meetings the employees at Watertown HVMA enthusiastically entered the partnership. Dr. Bail had visited the Mandevu Family Support Home sponsored by the Society for Women and AIDS in Zambia or SWAAZ. He found a group of dedicated care-givers, most often grand-mothers or aunties of the children orphaned by AIDS. The women were in dire poverty themselves but they were struggling to feed and provide educational opportunity for children who otherwise would not go to school. They needed very simple items to be able to run a community pre-school and to support the children who had gained entrance into the government basic schools.

Over the years several representatives from the Watertown Center have visited Mandevu Compound with Dr. Bail. These include Dr. Joseph McCabe and his daughter, Erin, David Mitchell the son of Pediatrician, Dr. Kathy Mitchell and Trish Hao, the daughter of one of our nurses. We have provided school fees, books, clothing, shoes and school uniforms so that the children from Mandevu could attend school, and we have provided training and support for the volunteer teachers in the pre-school.