Terry's Tanzanian Sketchbook

In January 2006, Montreal’s famed Gazette cartoonist Terry Mosher (Aislin) traveled to the Southern Highlands of the East African nation of Tanzania to visit Highlands Hope.

Highlands Hope Umbrella is a small network of health professionals and community activists who are struggling on the frontline of an HIV-AIDS pandemic that is scything through the people of this rural, mountainous region.

The nurses, organizers, and ordinary patients involved with Highlands Hope Umbrella are courageous, committed, and racing against the clock to bring education, testing, and anti-retroviral therapies to thousands of individuals who are suffering with the disease. This includes the widows, widowers, and orphans whose already difficult lives have been made almost impossible by HIV.

Highlands Hope Umbrella demands justice and better treatment for the people of rural Tanzania. In a very short time and with almost no government support, the Highlands Hope Umbrella HIV clinics have already provided testing and treatment to more than 3,000 patients. And it’s just a beginning.

In the Tanzanian Sketchbook that came out of the trip, Terry Mosher captured the beauty, the heartbreak and the courageous determination of Highlands Hope Umbrella activists like nurse Betty Liduke, community-organizer Jackson Mbogela, and the men, women and children who make the Makete and Njombe Districts of Tanzania a very special place.