OUR PROJECTS
Our “Tesfa Manoriya Bota”, translated as Hope Home, is a wonderful facility which can house around 25 children at any one time. It’s a Transition Centre where we work with the local government to identify the street kids in greatest need and enrol them into our centre. These boys have had a horrendous life and we are thrilled to be able to provide them with a safe, loving, caring home environment where they can feel secure. Not having to wonder where the next meal will come from is new territory for these lads, as indeed is sleeping in a proper bed.
All the boys will have their own bed and they will be sharing a room with friends who they have been on the streets with. We also provide showering facilities and a full medical check up.
Our carefully selected staff team spend a lot of time with the boys and we have specially trained psychologists and counsellors assessing each individual child. Over the coming months we will develop an individual care plan for each child to ensure we give them the best opportunity to enjoy their childhood and prepare them to be well equipped young men before embarking on adult life.
Children can be on the streets for a variety of reasons including, poverty, as a result of child trafficking or simply because they are orphans with no one to care for them. Wherever possible we try to re-unite the children with family or even extended family. In these cases we continue to support the child once they are reunified by providing for their education and assisting their family with some income generation initiatives. For others however, there may be no family and so in these cases the children will transfer to one of our “group homes”. With God’s help we believe that the life of every single child we rescue can be completely transformed.
When we rescue orphaned children from the streets, or find children who may have been in an abusive home environment which it would not be safe to return the child to, we create new “Group Homes” for them. Typically these will consist of eight or nine boys who have previously spent a transitional period in our Tesfa Manoriya Bota. Here they will have encountered other children from our existing Group Homes and when they are ready we transfer them to their new long-term Group Home. Here they will be loved and cared for by live-in house mums and we try, as far as is possible, to replicate a traditional home environment. To be honest the conditions in our Group homes are far superior to what the children will have encountered prior to being rescued – but we feel that having endured the trauma for so long, they deserve a more pleasant environment. The lads all go to school together and their House mum ensures that all their homeworks get done and that they do their fair share of chores around the house. We are currently planning for our third Group Home.
Hope365 Academy is providing education and meals for over 300 very appreciative pupils. Included in the numbers are many of the Street Kids we rescued from the streets in previous years. Alongside them are other boys and girls who, if we hadn’t stepped in, may well have had to resort to living on the Streets themselves due to the extreme poverty.
Watch the short video and see for yourself the pride in the faces of the girls and boys in their smart new uniforms as they enjoy not just a good education, but also regaining their childhood.
We are delighted that the school gives us the opportunity to help very vulnerable girls. Because they will now receive a nutritious meal each day they are more less likely to fall victims of unscrupulous men who prey on their need for food. For the first time, all these children can look to their future with real hope.