Testimony

8 March is an important day for the rights of all women in the world, but today is a special day for Eveline in particular: today she opened a small business in Chad, while her 7-year-old daughter goes to school for the first time.

Perhaps you remember her, we have told the story of this young 20-year-old girl we met in the Le Bon Samaritain de Walia Hospital Complex in the past, who was urgently hospitalised because she was totally frail due to HIV seropositivity.

Many donors of the MAGIS Foundation were touched by this story read on social networks and started to send their help and support with funds and letters of encouragement. Eveline thus left the hospital and we continued to follow her at home, in the family dynamics. You can imagine the life of a young HIV-positive woman living in the same neighbourhood where she was born, known to everyone and with a small child. Her mother died when she was a teenager. Her daughter, Emanuela, is also HIV positive. Eveline's father is elderly, no longer has the strength to work and his age has been compounded by a fractured ankle from a motorbike accident. The brothers try to support everyone, but they have large families to cope with. Eveline lives with her daughter and her dad - to be looked after - in a room made of mud bricks. A single room for three people, with only one door, no windows. A room in which one lives only to sleep and to store the dishes and a few pots and pans. All the rest of the day is lived outside the house, in the open air.

Day by day her friendship with Sabrina Atturo, the MAGIS project manager in Chad, has strengthened. She brings us news about Eveline and the other people reached thanks to MAGIS projects. Thanks to Sabrina, Eveline "found out where Italy is," the project manager recounts, "I showed her pictures of our cities, I visit it with the various cooperators who arrive in Chad, she understood that there is a support group in Italy, of friends who are there to help her and try to make her life dignified.

Thanks to the donation funds Eveline now has:

- a weekly contribution to do her shopping and have a varied diet to strengthen her body

- paid the annual school fees for her daughter, who is 7 years old and this is her first year at school

- started her own small business to start being autonomous.

"Ever since we met," says Atturo, "she always told me about her mother running a small but profitable business: selling water and fruit juices prepared by her along the roadside where hundreds of people walk to get to work, school, visits. A strategic place, before a pedestrian bridge linking a large suburb of the capital N'Djamena. It was from listening to her that the idea of being able to replicate what her mother was doing matured. That's how, thanks to donations from MAGIS friends, we bought a glassiere, a parasol and some plastic cups to start selling water to passers-by during these months when it gets up to 45°".

Today, 8 March, Eveline will start trading, 'we decided on this date together because it is the best way to celebrate the dignity of women, the dignity of Eveline. A day of celebration and autonomy'.

Eveline's simple story is the story of a change in which everyone can collaborate, because it is only together that we can make the world a fairer place.

Source: Fondazionemagis.org