What happened to the Children’s Village plans?

Since moving to Uganda, I have learnt so much. It was easy for me to think I knew what was needed while sitting at home in the UK, thinking about Uganda.  However, once we moved here, I realised how much I didn’t know and just how complicated 'helping' is! When we moved here, we thought we would be helping set up a children’s village for orphaned, abandoned and very vulnerable children as well as working in the slum communities. We had some questions about this so we set about doing 'research'. This involved visiting a variety of projects, looking closely at the issues and needs in the slum communities and talking to experts in the area of children in Uganda. This took us on a very interesting journey and ended up shaping our vision for the work here.  

What we discovered was that in Uganda there are a huge number of children in institutional care. There are 50,000 children estimated to be living in approximately 800 institutions (orphanages and children’s centres) across Uganda. The shocking thing is, is that the majority of these children (80%) have a living parent or living relatives. Many of these children end up in institutional care for a host of reasons other than having no one that loves them or wants to care for them.  Many children end up in institutional care because of poverty. This is not just an issue in Uganda, but the world over.  Parents often in desperation leave their child at an orphanage in the hope that they will be fed, go to school and have medical needs met. Many families are not able to provide these basics for their children and an orphanage seems the only option. Orphanages are in plentiful supply and very often the funding is also plentiful as many Western donors want to fund orphan care.

A question that has been bothering me for a while is in the UK and generally in the Western world, we phased out orphanages and institutional care over 30 years ago as we know how damaging it is for children.  So why is it so acceptable to fund an orphanage in another country when we don’t believe it is best for our own children? Today I discovered that since 1992 there has been a 119% increase in orphans in Uganda. What I found unbelievable was that in the same period of time, there has been 1624% increase in children in institutional care!

Of course there are many many reasons why children end up in institutional care and some of them are legitimate. It breaks my heart however to think of many children separated from parents or grandparents who love them because of lack of money. What would Uganda and many other countries look like, if the money had been ploughed into supporting, equipping and empowering families rather than building orphanages?

‘Working with families and trying to tackle poverty and the issues that stem from it is messy work. Putting kids in orphanages is easy.’  I don’t want to settle for easy. I want to see long term change, empowering families to have the resources, skills and knowledge to stay together and support their children themselves.  I believe this is what Jesus would want too – reaching out and supporting a whole family rather than just removing a child.

That’s why I am so excited about the current work that Revelation Life are doing and some of the ventures we are moving into. Our heart is to work closely with very poor families in slum communities, supporting them in spiritual, practical and training needs. Walking through some very difficult situations with them and helping people find opportunities for the future. Seeing these families grow and blossom is beautiful. I don’t think there is anything more precious than seeing the love between a parent or caregiver and their child. We are also in the planning stage of a family centre where families in extreme crisis situations will be able to live for a fixed period of time while they are given the support, counselling and skills to get back on their feet.  Hopefully this will be a lifeline to some parents who really love their children but just have been dealt a lot of bad cards in their life.

It may be a tricky business supporting broken families but definitely worth it in the long run. Children deserve to grow up in family, whether this is with their biological family, extended family or new family -  the important thing is that every child has the right to belong and to be loved as part of a family and not to be a number in an institution. I pray that through our work here at Revelation Life we will help provide this basic need to some of the children we meet.