Mombasa Orphans

A group of four City professionals - Sabrina Anwar, Zertasha Malik, Rubecka Anwar & Rizwan Saeed will be volunteering at the centre in Mombasa through an organisation called Original Volunteers between 7th and 25th April 2010. For just under 3 weeks we will be helping and teaching at an orphanage, educational, and drop in centre for disadvantaged and orphaned children. We will be assisting teachers and teaching the classes ourselves as well as getting involved with other activities and tasks around the centre which will range anything from helping the kids work in the local fields, fix fences and collect water to simply tucking them in their beds at night. We want to help these children as much as we can, and that's where you come in!

Please help us to help the children of Mombasa by donating generously and by attending our fundraising dinner.

'Street' children live alone, on the streets, without shelter. Some of them have lost contact with their families. Most of them are orphaned by HIV, Aids and Hepatitis and/or are abused. These children have no one to care for them. With a profound sadness in their eyes, lost in their own world, these children try desperately to forget about their problems and the hard lives they live. If you talk to them and ask them why they live on the streets their answer will often be 'I need to work for my family' or 'I lost my parents'. It's not even uncommon to see young women, a baby girl cradled in one arm, heavily pregnant and openly sniffing glue, their only means of escape from the misery of their unfulfilled lives. Scenes like these can move you to tears, making you question and realise how lucky we actually are therefore, honestly cannot stress how much this orphanage needs our help.

A recent volunteer summed it up perfectly when describing her thoughts at seeing this young pregnant mother sniffing glue.
"I was holding back my tears in myself, I was thinking to take that one child and help her but I could not. I bought them something to eat. It was very hot and the young girl was wearing a warm sweater and her mum was incredibly tiny, the baby although malnourished, seemed too big for her arms, when I compared this to our own images of mothers in Europe, healthy and happy, it made me feel ashamed to be so privileged."

This Orphanage has transformed the lives of many. One such life is that of Odongo, a 17 year old boy. At a young age, due to an abusive parent he was forced to live on the streets in Nairobi. He lived on the streets for 4 years, experiencing horrendous crimes against him, and committing petty crimes himself, before he hid in the toilets of a train to Mombasa (a 16 hour journey). In Mombasa, the orphanage found him. Soon he was at the rescue centre and working hard. His aim for the future is to be a human rights lawyer for children and help those who are his old situation, in fact he has become an inspiration to the younger boys at the centre and its truly humbling to meet a 17 year old driven as much as he is to better the situation of others.

One of the things we hope to achieve during our time at the Grandsons Of Abrahams orphanage is to complete the dining room. An extract from a recent email from the orphanage:

"Although it sounds like something of a luxury having somewhere sheltered to cook is vital to our centre. At present we cook in a temporary sheet metal structure over an open fire. It has poor ventilation and is like cooking inside an oven but more importantly it is prone to flooding during the rainy seasons (of which Kenya has 2) and because it’s an open fire one it floods or the firewood is wet we cannot cook. Because the food is mostly dried (porridge, rice and beans for example) being unable to cook means we are unable to feed the children properly. This is a serious problem. Also, cooking over an open fire is extremely inefficient, for example the older boys take it in turns to get up at 4.30am because school to start to fire to cook porridge for breakfast.

In addition completion of the dining room would give us some much needed sheltered communal space for art, homework, games etc. Therefore efforts towards finishing this structure would be a really good."