Have your gift multiplied through self-help groups today

Your wonderful gift today will not only ease the suffering of people like Raju with the cure and care for leprosy, it will be multiplied through self-help groups, ensuring you will be helping generations to come.

Your gift today could: 

• help to ensure leprosy is detected early, and provide the course of medicine that cures this deadly disease before it causes disabilities - like it did with Raju's hands. 
• provide someone like Raju with the surgery he so desperately needs to correct the clawing that leprosy has caused in his hands - and provide physiotherapy to help him use them properly again. Raju could play with his beloved daughter again and sew for her. 
• help to start a new local self-help group for the leprosy-affected and those with disabilities. The group offers support to help people through the difficult rehabilitation process and can also offer modest loans to help start a small business. 

Your gift is multiplied through self-help groups as loans like Raju's are repaid and lent out again and again - impacting lives for generations to come. 

Until 2018, Raju was perfectly content in his life. He had a skilled trade as a tailor, a loving wife and daughter, and many friends and neighbours he could rely upon. But then leprosy hit him out of the blue, and everything changed. 

Raju noticed that his hands had become disfigured and he could no longer use them very well. This meant he was unable to perform the tasks vital to his job - like treading a needle, using scissors or holding a measuring tape, and other tasks he enjoyed like making clothes for his daughter. 

Over the next 6 months, Raju's situation grew steadily worse. His income dropped rapidly which meant that he could no longer support his family. Reduced to poverty, Raju and his family were forced to move into very basic one-room accommodation. 

Raju became increasingly quiet and withdrawn. He found it difficult to communicate with his wife - and his daughter who simply didn't understand why their lives had changed so much, or why her father could no longer play with her like he used to. It broke Raju's heart every day. 

"I saw him quietly weeping in the bedroom..." Raju's wife says. 

Self-help groups are places where those affected by leprosy and disability can come together and support each other. Your support today can help fund the Bangladesh project that establishes self-help groups in communities like Raju's.