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Gemma Sisia credits her life direction to a moment she was watching TV as a young teen.
“It was 1985 and I was watching Live Aid with Bob Geldof, which was raising money for the famines in Africa, and I thought, what I would do to get over there and hand food out from a truck.”
Now 53, Gemma has fulfilled a version of her dream, having rescued thousands of children in sub-Saharan Africa from poverty. She’s also made a life for herself in Tanzania after falling in love with a man she originally tried to avoid.
She credits her strength, determination and know-how to her family — though her journey was one they begged her not to make.
Gemma grew up on a sheep and cattle farm around 80km north of Armidale in regional NSW. The only daughter among eight children, she says her brothers taught her “survival skills from birth”.
Her mother, from inner Melbourne, was determined her kids wouldn’t grow up like “country bumpkins” so made them take lessons in music and public speaking.
Her father transformed from a lawyer to a sheep farmer then back again, opening a law firm at 67 years old. By the time he died five years later, he had three offices in three different towns.
Gemma credits her strength and skills to the upbringing her parents gave her. Source: Supplied
“Growing up on a farm, being so far from town, I never saw tradesmen,” Gemma tells SBS Insight.
“We were forced to do everything ourselves. And I always think about my father — if he could start a whole new business at 67, then we can all do something.”
Gemma says living on a remote farm, her family learned to do everything themselves. Source: Supplied
Gemma’s dream to help in Africa stayed with her throughout high school. At university in Melbourne, she met a nun who’d been running a school in Uganda and told her they needed maths and science teachers.
So she finished her degree, qualified as a teacher and arrived in Uganda in 1994.
But the AIDS crisis was at its peak and she was quickly losing students.
“Their fathers were dying while their mothers, often uneducated, were unable to raise the money for school fees,” she says.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be great to build a good quality private school that didn’t charge school fees — so kids wouldn’t have to leave if their parents passed away or struggled to pay.”
Love changes everything
During the Easter holidays, Gemma travelled with a friend to the Serengeti in Tanzania and enjoyed a holiday romance with the safari tour’s “handsome” driver Richard.
But she’d come to Africa for work not love, so when Richard asked for her contact details, she gave him fake ones.
A holiday to Tanzania during the 1980s changed the direction of Gemma’s life. Source: Supplied
“His letters were returned and he realised the address was dodgy. But he knew I lived in Masaka — though that’s like saying we lived in Newcastle.”
Undeterred, Richard travelled from Tanzania to Masaka, Uganda, to find the girl he’d fallen for three months earlier, asking at the bus station for any places where young white women were living.
“A driver dropped him at a village — the woman there wasn’t me, but she knew me,” Gemma says. “Eventually, he tracked me down as I was sitting on the floor with some students. I saw this man walking towards me and it wasn’t until he was close that I realised it was Richard from Tanzania.
“The girls adored him so I thought ‘ok, we’ll start going out’.”
Over the next three years, Gemma and Richard travelled backwards and forwards between Tanzania and Uganda to spend as much time as they could together.
But her parents in Australia weren’t happy about the romance. When Gemma returned to Australia in 1997 and Richard came to visit, asking Gemma’s dad if he could marry her, the answer was no.
“Mum and dad were very conservative and wanted me to marry a Catholic doctor within driving distance of the farm, not an uneducated Tanzanian safari driver.”
But Gemma remained determined. Four years later, she flew to Tanzania, married Richard with only one of her brothers present, and started to raise funds to open a free private school to educate those in poverty.
From ‘hopeless’ to hopeful
Among Catholics, St Jude is the patron saint of hopeless cases, so was a “fitting name” for her school, Gemma says.
“I had just a $10 donation from a friend in Armidale, which felt pretty hopeless.”
But her father-in-law gave her two acres of land in Arusha, a town near the foothills of Mount Meru near Mt Kilimanjaro, and she raised enough money to build a classroom and playground. She opened the school within six months with just three children.
With plenty of help, Gemma built the first classrooms of her school and opened within six months with three children. Source: Supplied
“Growing up on a farm made me a jack of all trades. I had to deal with electricians, carpenters, builders and tradesmen. All my Swahili for the first five years was construction-related,” Gemma says.
It was also a busy time in her personal life; Gemma and Richard were welcoming their own children.
Soon after Gemma and Rich were married, they welcomed their first child. Source: Supplied
In 2025, the School of St Jude has one primary school and two secondary schools over three sites, around 330 staff plus 1,800 primary and secondary students. It also supports around 400 university students.
Last year, around 100 St Jude alumni graduated from university.
St Jude has an excellent academic record in Tanzania but requires $10 million each year to keep running, which is provided purely by donors, more than 90 per cent of them in Australia.
Gemma and her former students graduating from university. Source: Supplied
Being free, the school receives thousands of applications. To earn a place, students must sit a series of entrance exams, prove they volunteer in the community — and come from poverty.
“I want them to be motivated, have core values and be worthy of the scholarship,” Gemma says.
As of 2022, nearly 40 per cent of Tanzania’s population of 68 million were living on less than $3 per day, according to Statistica.
And while AIDS isn’t the scourge it once was thanks to modern medicine, Tanzania still has a relatively high death rate compared to most countries.
Life expectancy is 67 years old (compared to 83 years in Australia), according to the World Health Organization, with lower respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria among the leading causes of death.
“Around four kids per month lose a parent at St Jude, but because they’re on full scholarships, none of them have to leave,” Gemma says.
‘Follow your dream’
Gemma’s early students have now started to infiltrate the workforce — and her own life.
Her phone comes from a chain of phone shops in Tanzania owned by one of her former students. When her mother-in-law had an asthma attack, she was treated in hospital by one of her former students.
Within a few years, she hopes to see them emerge as the nation’s business leaders and CEOs.
“I’m a practical person and not very reflective, but I get very emotional when I run into my students out there in the world. Oh my gosh, that does it for me,” Gemma says.
She’s now working on an incubator program that offers grants to St Jude students who create, cost and market their own business.
“We’ve got kids who are recycling rubbish to make fertiliser, refurbishing old shoes or creating apps. I want to help them have an even bigger impact.”
While Gemma’s dad never got to see the school before he died, her mother came a few times, attending an assembly in 2008 that blew her away.
Unbeknown to Gemma, the students and parents had been told to come and say thank you to her for sacrificing her daughter and offer gifts.
“From that day, mum was totally pro the school, Richard and the family. She’d come with me to fundraise and stand behind the table, hustling for me.”
Gemma is forever grateful for the elocution lessons her mother forced her to have after school in Armidale.
“In mum’s last years, I told her thank God you taught us how to do public speaking. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to raise money for the school, and St Jude’s wouldn’t be where it is today.”
Gemma and Richard now have a family of four children, who are each making their own ways in the world. In them and in her students, Gemma tries to instil the importance of dreams, following your instincts and hard work.
Gemma and Richard now have four grown-up children. Source: Supplied
“I tell them they can do whatever they want to do, but they have to be prepared to work really hard every day to overcome all the obstacles.
“But if you follow your dream and don’t give up, eventually, you’ll get there.”
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