Milwaukee, WI yvonnessempijja1@gmail.com 414.940-2991

About Us

Founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA, we are an all-volunteer organization that raises funds to support community based initiatives at the grass roots level in Uganda. We work to improve the lives of grandmothers and their grandchildren who are struggling to survive because of the devastating impact of AIDS.

Grandmothers Beyond Borders began as a response to Mary’s story, a grandmother in Uganda who buried 14 of her children and is raising her 10 grandchildren in poverty. Mary is one of hundreds of thousands of grandmothers in Africa who care for and bury their own children and with amazing strength and courage become parents all over again. They do so at very old ages, with little support, few resources, and in poverty.

baby_with_grandmother

 

“How will we ever explain what we have wrought? What a universe this is. We came out of the Holocaust asking ourselves how we could ever live with the recognition that much of the world knew what was in those trains rumbling down the tracks to Auschwitz. We came out of Rwanda asking ourselves how it was possible that the world was inert in the face of a hideous genocide that everyone knew was taking place. It is my contention that years from now, historians will ask how it was possible that the world allowed AIDS to throttle and eviscerate a continent, and overwhelmingly the women of that continent, and watch the tragedy unfold, in real time, while we toyed with the game of reform.”

 

-Stephen Lewis

Co-Director, AIDS-Free World