Safety, Shelter & Food - Vulnerable Kids in Kibera

Managing a household responsible for the lives of the 20+ children that call St. Vincent's Rescue Center home is no easy task. Every day requries constant effort and attention to ensure that the children we care for --- children who have been through so much trauma in their short lives --- have what it takes to succeed. 

Our House Mother, Grace, and our board members manage the various needs of our home. This means much more than merely feeding the children, maintaining our rescue house facility and sending the children to school. It means too, ensuring HIV+ children get their medication, managing new children coming into our home, reintegrating children to their families, ensuring protection of children who come to us from abusive households and going to court for cases of abuse of children now under our care, working with the government to address land rights issues of children in our care and enduring the long process of getting birth certificates for children without them, among many others.

2015 has been good proof of the ups and downs that we navigate as we manage our household and care for children's complicated needs. We have faced challenges in transitioning children into secondary school after changes in the government system left three of our children without a school, devised activities for children to continue learning in the face of a 5-week teacher strike, managed the situation of a runaway teen, supported a child whose best friend drowned during a class trip he was also on and provided care to two sisters placed with us by the government after their stepfather attempted to kill them. While our scope of work -- providing care to 20 children -- may seem small, the challenges we face are not.

Also this year, our team was faced with the task of finding a conducive learning environment for one of our children who has a serious learning disability. Alice* has been with us for six years after she was found abandoned in a local market at the age of 7 or 8 with not a single known family member. When she first came to us, she could not even speak to tell us her name, let alone read or write. Over the last six years, we have been working with Alice to understand her learning challenges and help find the support and environment needed for her to succeed. Supporting children in Kenya with physical or mental health disabilities is a serious challenge as almost no resources exist. We get no support from the government to help address the specific needs of children like Alice.

For the past two years, Alice had been in a boarding school where she was gaining practical skills, but we observed that her learning had stalled and she still could not read or write. We felt she was capable of more given the right environment. So we took her for another medical assessment this year and received a referral to a day school in Nairobi where we enrolled her. One of our older children takes her to school each morning and our house helper, Anastasia, picks her up at the end of each day. Since May of this year, Alice is enjoying the gift of a talented teacher trained to work with students with disabilities and we are seeing good progress. She is increasingly vocal and has even begun to write! 

There is never an end to the challenges of running our home. We take each one as they come and do our best with the resources available to continue providing care to each child in light of their individual needs.

*Alice is the name used in this report to protect the identity of the child under our care.