And then you are reminded of all the challenges faced by PWD, who even have to pay for crutches or any other walking aid. I have enough material for a month of blogs.
I’m going to tell you about Kahororo, an area deep in the
countryside about 8km from Rukungiri town.
When you turn off the main road to head for the village, it becomes like
a farm track, we often walked the last section. The area is very hilly, but cultivated. It is beautiful, lush green fields, distant
high mountain ranges, plentiful trees of a host of varieties, including some
with flame red flowers, flashing in the sun amongst the greens and browns.
Kahororo school is a government nursery and primary school. We went outside with the nursery children.
Cute,
smiling faces, little hands reaching out to hold ours. Global Care has a
feeding programme at the school. 45 nursery children receive a meal of milk porridge
and a ‘bun’, and once a week, an egg. GC
supports the most vulnerable children from extremely poor families. On some days, this is the only meal these
little children eat.
Not only had most of them not seen a white person, many had
never seen a ball! Our gift of a bright orange football caused almost the
entire class to run shrieking and laughing around the field. It was an
excellent positive visit.
GC also sponsors children at the school, including *Miriam.
Miriam lives with her 5 siblings, (including 4 year-old-twins), her mentally
ill mother, and her father, who has an alcohol problem. The father earns a
meagre amount doing casual work, but only works when he’s sober. He doesn’t
earn enough to feed the whole family every day.
They were given clothes and welfare support, and the twins were enrolled on the feeding programme at the school. However, the school is 2km away and their mother couldn’t get them there.
The local GC team decided instead to sponsor Miriam. She can walk to school. They built a toilet (latrine) in the garden.
We visited the home, and met the twins, their mother and
their grandmother.
Their grandmother was grinding millet for flour using 2
stones – hard work. She made porridge for the children so they had something to
eat. The simple house was accessible, as the path is now clean and tidy. The
twins sleep in one room with their brothers and sisters. GC gave the twins bedsheets
to sleep on, but today the twins had wet the bed and they hadn’t been washed.
Moses decided they should try and buy a
mattress for the twins.
The twins were in torn ragged clothes, their little bare
feet covered in dried mud, their eyes dull and unresponsive. Unlike the children
at the school, these were not lively, happy children. They stayed close
together, hardly even relating to their mother. It was difficult to look at
them without our hearts being torn.
We
were quiet in the car, sad, frustrated and angry- but if the local team are
trying to shock me into coming home and banging on about Global Care, they’re
doing a good job.
If the twins’ story has made you wince, look at the Global Care Harvest Appeal. Or remember our 1st day, 158 children sponsored, and
2 files of waiting list. We visited a
home where a family waited 5 years for a sponsor – a grandmother and 3-year-old
boy living all that time in a one-roomed rented house after his parents died of
HIV. I’m not sure what our response will be to this trip – but I can tell you
with confidence, sponsorship here saves lives.
*Not her real name
*Not her real name
No comments:
Post a Comment