Regular readers of this blog will know that supporting homes for vulnerable children (HVCs) is very much on my heart. In this post I discussed the rights and wrongs of what I was at the time calling orphanages. Living in institutions is clearly not ideal, but in a country with a very young demographic there is a huge need for accommodation of children, as far as I can make out, well beyond the provision of places within family settings. Meanwhile, the HVCs I am aware of are set up by Ugandan people for Ugandan children selflessly and tirelessly working on behalf of their children, with often the leaders themselves having experience of living on the streets.
(Parenthetical point: I am now using the term home for vulnerable children, or HVC, for two reasons. One is that there can be sensitivities around other terms, particularly orphanages. The other is that it can be the case that children living in HVCs are not orphans in the literal sense of the word. Admissions criteria to HVCs is one of many things on my mind, certainly, if an alternative can be provided by wider family members or families in the community, then that needs to be actively pursued. Hope this is making sense!)
In this blog post I wrote about the 4 HVCs for which I’ve put together simple websites, thank you for visiting!
Meanwhile, HVCs operate without state assistance. There can be opportunities eg. to farm land attached to buildings, but in general HVCs are dependent to a very large extent on foreign donations. Experience working with leaders of HVCs leads me to believe that this is an extremely difficult thing to do from a number of points of view. One approach which can be successful is working with social media, this does, however, give rise to abusive messages from people thinking they are being scammed. Accessing support from large organisations in practice is difficult, with all manner of things which need to be put in place which for small organisations is difficult. And then access to services like PayPal is also very hard in this part of the world, with accounts constantly getting blocked – if it’s even possible to set them up in the first place.
So, I am offering my services as a channel for donations to 4 HVCs. I have already been doing this through PayPal, as you can see – top right of this page – I have added a page to my website enabling donations to be made. As far as I can see it is not possible within the donation to send me a message so ask that this is done separately.
So please consider giving on a one-off or regular basis. Please check out the websites and see what they’re doing. Get in touch with the leaders to see if you can support particular children if that’s what you’d like to do. Any thoughts you might have please do let me know. Thank you for reading today!
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