Getting to know Hilda Ntiya
FOCHTA’s True Backbone: Hilda Ntiya
By Robyn Lyall
Meeting the dynamic Mrs Hilda Ntiya’s one is immediately infected by her enthusiasm for life.
Where does the drive behind Mrs Ntiya involvement with her community come from? Not only is she the FOCHTA Grassroots Committee representative in the FOCHTA Board of Trustees, she helps run a nursery for young children on a daily basis. And of course her household is always bustling with activities, what with the four children she has, and in addition, she has taken in eight orphans whom she has adopted.
Born in 1965, the seventh child in a family of eleven, she remembers they ate only once a day and had sacks for blankets. She paid for her own school fees by doing piece work. However, in 1982, while studying the equivalent of Australia’s Form 1, she had to leave school to help look after her blind father and her mother who had diabetes and high blood pressure. Only two of her siblings remain: one who has paralysis and the other diabetes and HIV.
She therefore feels she does not want children to go through the hardships that she had experienced as a child.
In 1994 Mrs Ntiya joined Médecins Sans Frontières as a volunteer to help assist those children whose parents had died from HIV/AIDS. Then in early 2003, when FOCHTA first started, she became a FOCHTA grassroots member. Her tasks were to identify and monitor beneficiaries for FOCHTA in the Kasalika village area. She also helps run and support a day nursery for very young orphans as well as those in poverty. This nursery is run by mostly grandmas who belong to the FOCHTA Gogoz Group. There, the children are given porridge to ensure they have at least one meal per day. She also encourages local children to attend schools.