Visiting Happy Home

In May, our treasurer, Chris Lacey, had the pleasure of visiting Happy Home, at Kopere, to the east of Kisumu.  Chris summarises the visit below.

[For information: The former orphanage is now home to a thriving primary school with 350 children attending. The receive a Christian education to a better standard of learning than the local government provided schools can give. The previous occupants of the site are now being cared for by their guardian families and are no longer resident at Happy Home. One of the trustees in Kenya , together with the site manager, aims to visit as may of these young people as they can to check on their wellbeing. ]

I’d been to Kisumu, near Lake Victoria, during my work with Christian Aid; but Kopere, where Happy Home is based, was an hour and a half’s drive away, along some fairly gruelling roads (one of which did delay us quite considerably – see below), set amidst beautiful rolling hills with beautiful views of the Great Rift Valley.

While much of the first day was spent talking with the teachers and children at the school, the purpose of the trip – and the focus of the following three days – was to visit almost all of the 56 orphans as well as some of the tertiary education students whom kind individual sponsors are supporting in their college and university courses.  By far the most rewarding part of the visit was to meet five of those university students and witness for myself the great transformation that had taken place in their lives – from being orphaned at a young age and growing up in institutional care, to being the confident and successful young adults they now are: progressing well in their studies and with genuine opportunities and job prospects for the future.  On their behalf, as well as my own, an enormous thank you to all who have been part of those young people’s journeys.

The trips to visit children in their foster homes and secondary schools were less heart-warming, if I’m honest.  Very low standards of mud-brick housing were the norm, often with three or four children as well as adults sharing a single room to sleep, eat and live.  Schools, too, tended to be basic and far too overcrowded (although a notable, and encouraging, observation was that girls’ education, particularly girls’ schools, do seem to be a focus of the Kenyan government and were notably better).  But conversations with the children were revealing: Happy Home were certainly doing their best to visit and support them: all were receiving an education, and receiving their uniforms and subsistence… but, they weren’t excelling in their studies and the other trustees explained that they’d seen a marked deterioration in academic progress since Happy Home ceased having direct responsibility for their education.  It’s for this reason that the organisation has new plans afoot: namely, to extend the existing primary school into a full secondary school to which some of those orphans now at other secondaries can again return.  The idea is that they will repurpose previous orphanage accommodation into boarding facilities, and register with the Kenyan Department of Education as a fully licensed boarding school.  The initial assessment by the government has already been completed (favourably), and the most urgent challenge is to build another classroom in time for the next intake in September (at a cost of £7,000 – building work hopefully to be completed in August!).

Please pray for:

• the children who are struggling in their schools and foster homes,

• the foster parents who have found it difficult to bring another child into their home,

• for the trustees (both in Kenya and UK) as we embark on this ambitious plan to move forward and continue to help the orphans of Kenya as best we can.

Here we see Chris with some of the university students.