Donated piggery helps fight malaria in Uganda

Once you experience helpless, impoverished mothers and babies dying from malaria one asks: "What can be done about this?"

One answer is empowering the staff of a local malaria clinic in Nakifuma, Uganda, to support their big ideas. The entire community is celebrating the arrival of 10 little pigs donated by St. Raymond Parish Community in Mount Prospect.

Their big idea is to call upon the "piggery" to assist the staff in providing a sustainable source of no-cost medicine especially available to moms and babies dealing with endemic malaria.

Enlisting pigs in this war against a troublesome, deadly disease is the latest strategy of Deacon Don Grossnickle and the Microfinance Alliance Africa Projects Foundation.

The start-up nonprofit works in rural Uganda addressing epidemic malaria fever. While there are too many mosquitoes and not enough medicine to help every feverish person needing help, the Alliance has sprung into action, inventing an unusual remedy to help partner with a local clinic run by volunteers with American sponsors willing to help.

The St. Jude's Mother and Baby Clinic was initially loaned $5,000 to secure the land, build the barnyard, purchase feed, hire a shepherd and has recently purchased piglets and a breeding boar.

The piglets will be raised to maturity and brought to market. The proceeds will hopefully pay for the purchase of medicine and buy more piglets and feed.

The payoff for the loan sponsors who finance the project is only the promise of receiving a report passing along stories of how the nearly 700 persons who come to the overwhelmed Nakifuma clinic each year have been helped and share their stories of healing and hope.

St. Raymond's Parish in Mount Prospect is currently the sole supporter that funded this innovative war against malaria via a 2018 Lenten Alms Giving initiative. St. Raymond parishioner Peter Tantillo, along with Deacon Grossnickle and Liam Brady from neighboring Our Lady of the Wayside of Arlington Heights parish, spearheaded the project. The trio formed the directorate of the newly formed nonprofit Microfinance Alliance African Projects Foundation. The founders received assistance in getting organized and applying for 501 (3)C status via the Kiwanis Club of Palatine.

Foundation co-director Tantillo says, "We have to trust that empowering the little clinic in Nakifuma with a pig farm concept in place can make some progress and do, hopefully, some good to save lives. Everyone acknowledges that Pigs Against Malaria is an experiment that should contribute to efforts to save lives."

"Our foundation has previously initiated microfinance projects using cows as helpers in order to raise funds for medicine in the village of Bikira and Kkonge. In those villages, a portion of the milk produced goes to the local malaria clinic to treat persons with malaria fever," said co-director Kiam Brady.

Grossnickle and Brady plan to visit the Nakifuma St. Jude Clinic Pig Farm operation in April. They hope to meet with three prospective new village officials who are very interested in working with the Alliance in finding ways to keep their local clinic shelves stocked with malaria medicine.

The ongoing need is great and the supply low and the cost, often sadly, is out of the reach of those of little means.