 Team Reports |
Who Received a Bedkit?Alan Ingram — Peterborough, ON
At each Kenya distribution for Sleeping Children Around the World [SCAW] the children receiving bedkits included orphans, children with HIV/AIDS, children with unemployed parents, and children raised by a single grandparent. To find these children the Rotary Club of Nairobi sought the assistance of many volunteer organizations providing children’s services in the poor communities. Following the elections in Kenya in December 2007, rioting resulted in many deaths and 300,000 displaced from their homes. People fear to return home even though order has been restored. This added a fifth group of children: IDC (internally displaced children) like Patroba who lived in the Rift Valley with her parents and two siblings. She was not home when rioting broke out and rioters murdered her family. Without immediate family members she escaped the area with the help of family friends and now finds herself in an orphanage more than two hundred kilometres from her home community without friends or family.
Patroba speaks eloquently about her situation, not bitter about those who took her family away but with sadness about her personal loss. She hopes to help others and is combatting her grief by becoming a leader in her school. The bedkit is her most important possession since the rioting began. Jacob is an eleven-year-old at Kumuchu Primary School in Thika. His parents are alive but his father is sick with HIV/AIDS and his mother struggles to raise seven children while taking care of her ailing husband and trying to do casual labour. Jacob attends school irregularly because he is forced to take care of his siblings when his mother is out trying to find work. Many times the family skips meals because most of what the mother earns is used to care for the father who is currently bedridden. Despite family hardships, Jacob remains cheerful in sacrificing his future to help his parents and siblings. Ritah was born with HIV. Her father died of AIDS and she does not know where her mother is. She is being raised by her paternal grandmother, not unusual in this country.
The issue of HIV/AIDS is prominent in the education system. At each school we visited, the poems, songs or plays the children presented to us included the theme of HIV/AIDS, thus educating the children about this issue while they are in school. Unfortunately for Ritah, her parents did not learn these lessons. Upon seeing and meeting these children, it is hard to think of them as part of a large mass of unknown people in a third world country. Each child has a distinct personality and is deserving of basic rights and opportunities. The bedkits represent a small step in that direction. In each distribution site we were asked to return next year with even more bedkits. |
