By Dr Elizabeth Hynd | Project Director
This project is our attempt to address the situation of orphans we have not adopted into New Hope Centre. Currently UNICEF reports over 300,000 children are orphaned and vulnerable in Swaziland out of a population of just one million people. These children live in very distressing situations; many have no adults in their lives to guide them or care for them. Many are forced to beg or steal to survive in their communities as they have no relatives remaining to support them. In the past, orphaned children were always absorbed into the extended family when Swaziland had fewer challenges, but in these years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic the adult population has been reduced drastically. This means that most adults are already caring for their own children, their siblings' children and the extended family. Many couples are now caring for 20 to 30 children making many homesteads like orphanages with only two parents or a grandparent caring for them all. When a grandparent is the only caretaker, there is no bread winner among them. The grannies are often times totally illiterate and not equipped to assist their children with their homework or unfamiliar life issues.
Our attempt to address this situation has been the development of a ministry arm of our family in which we reach out to primary schools by invitation. Three times a year we visit these schools where the student body may consist entirely of orphaned children to share hope and encouragement. Our objective is to encourage them and direct them towards a future of hope. We also run a weekly Hope Club with our trained Youth Leaders as well as Hope Camps during school vacation times.
This micro-project was not well supported. This was disappointing because these children are desperately in need of help. Without it the adult generation of tomorrow will struggle to find its place and will be poorly prepared to step into roles of leadership with the integrity needed to guide the nation. We were able to provide a weekend of training for the youth leaders using the limited funds from this project and other funds given directly to New Hope Centre by a visiting family from Philadelphia to whom we are exceedingly grateful. This micro-project for funding is retired but the work continues. The past three weeks our children have been getting up at 4:00 and 5:00 AM daily to go out to the schools to run assemblies with messages of encouragement.
With gratitude,
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can recieve an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
