Loveness is a mother of five children.  She is pregnant with her sixth child.  She lives near Maternity Africa’s Kivulini Maternity Centre in a small village called Duka Bovu. Sadly, her husband was killed recently during a robbery at the house where he worked as a security guard.

As a poor widow, Loveness and her five children went to live with her mother-in-law, to have a roof over their heads and have something meagre to eat.

Despite her vulnerable and precarious domestic situation, Loveness attended our antenatal clinic.  We discovered that she is HIV positive.  One of the midwives realised that Loveness was not taking her anti-retroviral treatments, that she was malnourished and that she seemed to be quite depressed. The midwife organized a home visit and accompanied Loveness to her mother-in-law’s home.

When Maternity Africa’s team arrived in Loveness’s village, it soon became clear that the villagers were treating her badly, pointing their fingers at her and calling her names.  Loveness’s mother-in-law had found out that she is HIV positive and shared this with the village.  

Loveness and her children are treated terribly because of the stigma: sometimes they eat only one meal every three days. Loveness has become more depressed.  She cries a lot because of her situation and the cruelty. 

Loveness’s wish is to live with her own family in Ngorongoro again, to provide a better and happier life for her children. However, her mother is disabled and her father is very old.  They have no space in their house for her and her children.  Loveness’s relatives can offer her a small plot of land to build a house on, but Loveness has not got any money.

Would you like to help provide some funding, so that Loveness can build a simple house and provide her children with a happier and healthier life?  A simple brick house and some mattresses costs approximately five million Tanzanian shillings (around USD 2,000, GBP 1,650).

Thank you!

(Photograph credit – arqa.com, used for illustrative purposes only).