Karen Gleason walks with children in Uganda. Karen and her husband Gil funded an AIDS clinic in 2005 that is now a hospital serving 100,000 in Uganda’s Ruwenzori foothills.
Photo Courtesy Karen Gleason
Orinda Couple Befriends Non-Profit in Uganda
In 2005, longtime Orinda residents Karen and Gil Gleason created Friends of Ruwenzori (F.O.R.), a non-profit for AIDS prevention in the Western Region of Uganda. They were inspired by the work of a community-based organization - launched by Anglican priest Ezra Musobozi and his wife Marjorie in 1999 – to teach HIV prevention in the rural foothills of the Ruwenzori Mountains. After conducting too many funerals, the native Ugandan couple launched a new counseling program, Kitojo Integrated Development Association (KIDA).
Fast-forward 10 years and the Gleasons’ F.O.R. is going strong. It funds a hospital serving 100,000 people, as well as vocational schools in carpentry, tailoring and masonry, an orphan and vulnerable children’s program, the KIDA drama group working to lessen the AIDS stigma, a micro-finance sustainable cooperative, and a rural health insurance plan. In January, 2016 the regional Department of Health ranked the KIDA hospital first in the top 10 performing facilities for 2014-2015.
On their first trip to Uganda in 2001 the Gleasons were impressed “by how much Ezra and Marjorie were doing with very little money,” teaching hundreds of illiterate poor people how to prevent HIV infection using the mediums of music, dance and live drama in the local language. The Muzobozis planned an AIDS clinic and engaged hundreds of people to make bricks for it.
On a return trip to Uganda in 2003, Karen saw that same pile of 40,000 hand-made bricks, along with a $5,000 donation from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland for cement, turned into a tiny AIDS clinic. Two hundred people came for testing at the opening of the clinic, which operated without electricity. Karen used her background as a clinical lab scientist to record results in the lab. She also vowed to return home and find KIDA more funding.
While still working at the microbiological clinical laboratory at San Francisco General Hospital, Karen started taking non-profit organization classes at the SF Foundation. Realizing “things grow into bigger things,” she decided to retire after 39 years in a career she loved because F.O.R. was becoming more than she could handle with her full-time job. Gil continued to teach violin and viola, playing with the Oakland Symphony and conducting the Oakland Community Orchestra, which he founded in 1964.
Gil Gleason plays the violin for a crowd of 300 at a country church in Uganda in 2001. Most had never heard a violin before.
Photo Courtesy Karen Gleason
On his first trip to Uganda in 2001 Gil played his violin a dozen times. But the most memorable was during a service in a country church where the senior warden asked Gil to hold his violin. Gil agreed. Then the warden turned to the congregation of 300 and asked: “How many of you have heard a violin before?” After two or three hands were raised he continued, ”In the olden times violins were played for princes and kings. Gil, today you made us all princes and kings.”
Subsequent trips to Uganda involved many family members and friends. In 2007 an East Bay contractor joined a trip with Karen and learned brick laying from a 15-year-old Uganda boy who was attending the KIDA vocational school. In 2010 the Gleasons’ son Mike and daughter-in-law Jen used their broadcasting experience to create a video of KIDA in action. Moses, the Ugandan orphan Karen and Gil sponsored who dreamed of being a doctor, caught up with his education in Kampala, attended medical school in Ukraine, married, named his first daughter Karen and is now a practicing surgeon in Uganda.
Last November’s F.O.R. Green and Yellow Festival at Piedmont Veterans Hall netted $33,000, representing a big slice of the organization’s $170,000 budget to fund KIDA programs. However, the long-term goal has always been for KIDA programs to become self-sustaining. “Ezra and Marjorie are committed to empowering people to take control of their lives, improving their own health by helping others,” said the couple.
For more information on KIDA visit: www.FriendsofRuwenzori.org. Or view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlqGmgUCE-M