Bay Area AIDS researcher helps out Kenyan orphans

he lives of 200 Kenyan children were changed when they met Natasha Martin, an American woman who had come to visit their village in Butula, a region of the Busina District in western Kenya in 2000. Martin, an AIDS researcher, was in the country to visit colleagues.

"I just found the children under a tree somewhere. I asked why they weren't in school, and I was told they were orphans and there was no one to pay for their education," recalls Martin, a Half Moon Bay resident. "I said, 'I'll make sure you go to school.' I had no idea what I was getting into."

Martin paid to send each of the 200 children to elementary school, an expense of $6,000. When it was time for the children to go to high school, she sought donations through her newly formed nonprofit, G.R.A.C.E USA (Grassroots Alliance for Community Education). Today, due to G.R.A.C.E USA's Naisula Project, many of the children are in university studying to be lawyers, doctors or engineers. They call Martin "Mama Natasha."

"Education is a right," Martin said. "I'd sell my house to educate these kids."

In late May, Martin was recognized for the far-reaching work of G.R.A.C.E USA in combating the effects of HIV/AIDS in communities across Kenya with the Jefferson Award for community service, presented weekly by the American Institute for Public Service.

The 200 children enrolled in the Naisula Project are a tiny percentage of the estimated 1.3 million Kenyan orphans who have
lost their parents and grandparents to AIDS since the epidemic began, according to UNAIDS. Martin, a former pediatric AIDS researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, founded G.R.A.C.E USA in 2001 after a visit to Kenya in 1998 to present a scientific paper.

In those days, an AIDS diagnosis was seen as death sentence. After talking with members of several local community health groups, Martin became convinced that treatment and education were the keys to fighting the epidemic, but that success lay in Kenyan communities themselves taking the initiative, with a little help from G.R.A.C.E USA and other groups.

"From the beginning, we've always said the community has to own whatever they do. The local people best know how to identify and solve local problems," said Martin, who was born in Barbados and received much of her secondary education in England.

True to its philosophy, G.R.A.C.E USA now partners with just over 100 organizations in Kenya already hard at work preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS in their communities, and helping improve the health and quality of life for its victims. In training sessions provided by G.R.A.C.E USA, different groups have learned how to administer home-based, family HIV testing and counseling services, leading to a surge in families willing to be tested who did not want to face the stigma of going to a public clinic.

Another program provides goats to orphans who learn how to build a shed and how to grow drought-resistant grass for the animals. The goats give the orphans milk and a future in farming.

Another community effort, led by a group of Maasai women in Kenya, has taught midwives cleaner delivery techniques that lower the spread of HIV at childbirth.

The groups also learn to raise money on their own and apply for grants, which has resulted in vocational schools and medical clinics that are entirely community-owned and run, said Martin. She calls this a "bottom-up" approach that differs from the philosophy of international agencies operating in Africa.

"Their assumption is that the world is full of stupid people who don't know what to do for themselves," said Martin. "What they don't understand is that when the community owns what they do, we don't have to spend our money to coerce them into doing what they should do."

G.R.A.C.E USA manages to accomplish everything it does with $380,000 a year — a fraction of the budget of leading humanitarian organizations. Martin, who has never taken a salary, is now scrambling to raise half that amount, or $190,000, for her group by the end of the year.

Much of G.R.A.C.E USA's funding comes from U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and a host of other U.S. foundations.

But a chunk of its budget also comes from a source much closer to home — the generosity of residents of Half Moon Bay. Hundreds of Coastsiders have contributed to the Naisula Project, sending the orphans to school. Home-schooled Coastside students raise thousands of dollars each year by putting on a Half Moon Bay talent show.

Martin's work has also inspired fellow Coastsiders to volunteer for the project in Kenya. Montara resident Kate O'Shea, a physical therapist, visited Nairobi to learn more about the effects of the AIDS epidemic after getting to know Martin while treating her for a hip problem at Seton Coastside Hospital.

O'Shea found evidence of Half Moon Bay in Nairobi when she discovered a health project, funded by the Half Moon Bay Rotary Club, that inoculated 2,500 pregnant women to prevent their children from contracting HIV.
source:www.insidebayarea.com