In Tanzania, there is discrimination based on your HIV status. In the
public sector, you cannot be discriminated by the government based on your
health. However, those jobs usually require more education. In the private
sector, if you have HIV, the chances of you getting hired to work is next to
zero. The Valley of Blessing church have been trying to support several HIV+
individuals by providing them with opportunities to grow crops for food.
Nonetheless, their hope is to get sewing machines to train the HIV+ individuals
so that they can become self-employed. A sewing machine ranges from 150,000 for
a manual to 250,000 Tanzania Shillings for an automatic; this is $104-$173
. When you earn less than $1/day, that
is a difficult amount of money to come up with. My team is brainstorming for
possible solutions to help the HIV+ individuals become self-employed.
Here is a story of a widow who was healed of HIV:
There was a widow in the Valley of Blessing Church. She is one of the
poorest individuals in the church as she earns less than $1/day. She has 5
children, all have grown up and the youngest of her children was born in 1988,
but her youngest can’t afford to go to school. Only her first two children had
been guaranteed an education because her husband use to be rich. Her husband
had died in the year 2000 from HIV and he had AIDS for about 10 years before he
finally passed away. She had gotten infected through him. When he had earned a
lot of money on his job, he spent his money on alcohol and on women, which was
how he had gotten infected in the first place.
One day the widow heard of a
crusade that was going on in Morogoro and she felt in her heart that if she
went she would be healed. At the same time, she thought that if she went and if
she wasn’t healed, that she would be humiliated for her faith. She went anyways
to the crusade. The preacher called her out of the crowd and told her she would
be healed and he prayed for her. Although she had been HIV positive, she went to
get tested again after that incident and she was HIV negative. She had been
healed of AIDS and from that moment on she became a follower of Jesus Christ.
