Lorna with baby Angel, the first girly at Child's i Foundation
This is baby Faith. We think she's about 18 months old, but she is a very tiny little girl. Adam and I are quite smitten :)
This is gorgeous four-month old Simon, the first baby to arrive at Child's i Foundation.There are 143,000,000 orphans in the world today. The population of orphans theoretically makes up the 7th largest nation in the world
Last weekend, Adam and I went to Kampala’s most well known and longstanding babies’ home, Sanyu. It was the first orphanage set up in Kampala in 1929, by a missionary sister, and since then tens of babies’ homes have sprung up around the city. The home can care for up to 50 little bundles of joy at any one time, and they are almost always running at full capacity.
Sanyu gives a safe haven for babies from anywhere from an hour old, up to four years of age. The home is run primarily by Ugandan ladies, called ‘Mammas’, and everyone from the babies to the visitors call them that collectively. These women are incredible. They clearly love the kids, but they also have a no nonsense strategy, due to the sheer volume of the crawling, walking and shuffling bubbas, and scoop and chuck them around, but miraculously in a way that doesn’t hurt or upset them.
I’ve never seen more than five Mammas there at any one time and so the home relies hugely on volunteers to come and help out with the changing, feeding, and bedding of the lively brood, along with just keeping them occupied. In no way is this a chore, and the home is constantly full up with visitors, mostly expats, who either are living there and just want to have a snuggle, or more commonly, by people who are looking to adopt. I don’t know a huge amount about adoption, let alone international or interracial adoption, but for most non-nationals, legally adopting a baby is a long and cumbersome process.
I’m not sure whether I agree with international or interracial adoption, because of the potential problems it causes for the child, especially for their sense of identity. To be a black child, growing up in a white family, in a country so far removed from their original culture, must be a challenge. Giving an abandoned child a nice home and loving parents is of course wonderful, but taking a child out of its native culture is not always what’s best for the child.
I’ve been to Sanyu a few times before, but this time the experience had a really profound affect on me. Firstly, a friend who I’d met back in September had come back to Uganda, and back to volunteering at Sanyu, primarily to see these two twin boys, Gideon and Gilbert, who’d had such an affect on her. She’s in her early twenties, and wants the boys to be adopted by a Ugandan family, however she wants to contribute to their upbringing, by setting up a fund to pay for their education herself. I was so impressed with her attitude to it all. She wants to be in their life, but in a way that is best for the boys, and I guess she doesn’t think adopting them herself would be.
Secondly, there was a little girl there, called Faith, who had been abandoned only days before. This little girl, with her perfect, gorgeous face, was so miserable and forlorn it just broke my heart. She sat upright for hours, just staring into space, with no interest in playing with the other children. From behind her body is so tiny that you’d think she was under one, yet when you look at her face, and see how advanced her expressions are, you realize she’s more like two, but just so malnourished and underweight. I tried to touch her, to stroke her arm, thinking she’d want to be picked up, but she just pushed my hand away, shaking her head with a huge confused frown on her face.
After a while of trying with her, I asked Adam to have a go. He sat next to her and reached out his finger to her. She stared at him for ages, but then eventually held on to it. In little stages like this she slowly warmed to him and at one point I turned around and she'd buried her head into his leg, hiding her little perfect face from the world. She stayed like that for ages.
Once Adam had gained her trust she let him pick her up, carry her and rock her the way a baby should be. He even got her to smile. I just couldn’t stop thinking about what she had been through. Where her Mum is, if she’s alive or dead, if she abandoned her because she couldn’t look after her properly, or if she was forced to abandon her. Is Faith a product of rape, has she experienced abuse, was her mother a victim of domestic abuse? I wonder what those little eyes have witnessed, whether she realized she was being abandoned, and how long she was alone and scared before someone found her.
Thirdly, I met one guy who is trying to adopt a little boy, Joshua, who may die. He’s currently got TB and is being treated, but at six-months old he also has HIV. This guy and his wife have already adopted two Ethiopian children, and heard about Joshua through an adoption network they’re associated with. He flew out to Uganda to meet Joshua and start the process. He simply wants to give this little boy as good a life as he can. It’s so selfless – and really reaffirmed for me that some people just want to help others regardless of the obstacles that may be in their way, or the heartache it may cause them.
Adam's going to finish his work two weeks early to go to the home everyday and play and look after the 46 babies they currently have there. It's the most magical place. Although all these babies have no mums and dads that can look after them, there are so many people that love these babies and give their time to brighten their days. Here’s the link to their site for more info: www.sanyubabies.com
Statistics on the number of orphans in Uganda are not exact, but earlier this year Unicef estimated that there are 2.5 million orphans in Uganda, representing nearly 10% of the population. Of those 2.5 million, over half have lost either one or both parents to aids.
The civil war in the north of the country has deprived many children of fathers and brothers; they’ve lost sisters to sexual servitude and their mothers have been left to bring up huge families alone. Gender disparity and domestic violence are still rife within Uganda. Polygamy often leads to families with so many children that the family cannot look after and support all the children. Abuse of children and their rights is still a huge issue, with many teenage girls being raped by family members, resulting in pregnancies that they do not want and are not old enough to handle.
A friend of mine has just set up her own transitional babies home in Kampala, to help young women who don't have the capacity or the support to keep their babies. Child’s i Foundation tries to prevent mothers abandoning their children in the first place, giving them the support, counseling and skills to provide for themselves, ultimately empowering them o keep their children. They opened last month, and currently have six babies in their care – all of whom I believe are coincidently little chaps! The home looks after the babies for six months, giving them excellent healthcare and love. Meanwhile, their mothers are invited to come and visit the babies everyday to get to know them without the overriding burden of worrying that they cannot currently provide for them. Two of the mothers whose little boys are currently in the babies home are only 14. Both of their boys are the product of rape; both by close family members.
My friend Lucy, the mastermind behind the home, called Malaika – meaning ’angels’, comes from a TV background and used to be one of the producers on Big Brother, among other shows. Using social media, she runs the website as a blog, regularly uploading short film clips so that contributors and partners feel involved with every stage of the organisation’s progress. Her home is a truly original idea, trying to tackle and prevent the cause of abandonment, rather than deal simply with the consequences. Please check out her site http://www.childsifoundation.org to read about the home’s amazing progress. She’s currently in the UK and should be appearing any day on GMTV with Lorraine Kelly for an interview! So watch out for it!
“The media today in Uganda is more like public relations reporting. If you stick to real issues, you may not remain in the profession. You’ll be in danger.”
‒Radio journalist in Hoima district, Uganda
May 3rd marked World Press Freedom Day, and with that, unsurprisingly, brought up the issue of which countries across the world have press freedom. Ironically, given the topic in question, many articles and blogs were written about how in Uganda, despite what the current Press and Journalism Act says, journalists are not free to express themselves or the truth.
In the past year, since I’ve either lived or started to read about Uganda, I’ve seen the media curtailed in its attempts to report on events involving the government. On Sept 11th last year, the day I flew to Uganda for a visit, the capital, Kampala, experienced a series of riots.
To summarize, the government had banned a representative of the traditional leader, the King of Buganda, from visiting some of his people. The Bugandan youth went out onto the streets of Kampala and rioted against the government for disallowing the king to move freely.
The riots lasted for two days, resulting in the death of 40 civilians. The police began retaliations with tear gas and blank bullets, but once those ran out, they thought it appropriate to use real bullets that subsequently killed people. Throughout this all, several Ugandan journalists reported on the riots – or at least tried – however those that aimed to criticize the government were beaten and detained, frightened into keeping their stories out of the public arena.
Incidences such as these threaten to terminally undermine the Ugandan media. Detaining and beating journalists are just some of the means deployed to deter ‘bad press’. Threats are also made on the safety of writers’ families, and people are threatened with criminal charges. And in Uganda, the government has ultimate control of all public services. They are the police, the courts; they have manipulation of the entire justice system.
Along with the newspapers, many of the radio stations were usurped during the riots. Nine months on, many are still off air. The consequences of this were, and still are, far reaching. Outside of bustling Kampala, the majority of the population lives in rural towns. Few televisions exist and with high illiteracy rates, radio shows are the only way for people to regularly access information outside of their Districts. Without this form of media, people are unable to hear about news events from varying perspectives, inhibiting them from making informed decisions. With Uganda’s general election coming up in March of next year, these restrictions on press freedom will most likely hinder a fair and free election.
In a wider context, the behaviours of the government upon the media show that Uganda is perhaps not the democratic, non-partisan body that it claims to be. Their obvious lack of discretion in curbing bad press is also completely contradictory; they are stopping the media because they want a good reputation, yet their bullying and abusing of human rights gives them nothing but a bad reputation.
Further still, the government now wants to legally and publicly stop the media from criticizing the government. In Uganda, the Press and Journalism Act requires annual licensing and the government have put forward a draft proposal, making criticizing the government illegal. The Human Rights Watch is currently appealing to members of parliament to reject the proposed draft changes to the act, asking them to honour press freedom in light of the upcoming elections. What seems absurd to me is that a government would want to publicly become more autocratic in an increasingly democratic world. Looking outside of this context, many other things point to this conclusion. For instance, currently there is the proposed bill to make homosexuality illegal, introducing the death penalty for those found ‘guilty’. It seems Uganda is moving backwards, not forwards, in reducing human rights violations and creating a fairer, free society.
The effect of these restrictions is that journalists are scared, scared to report on anything considered controversial, and this is leading to continual self-censorship.
However, it is not all doom and gloom. Recently, journalists that were beaten by police, when trying to report on police living in a football stadium, won their case in court. The judge’s final comments expressed how freedom of speech for journalists in Uganda is essential. Perhaps the court and the government are mutually exclusive after all.
Coincidentally, last week I met a journalist who’s experiences put all of this in context and perspective. He was put in prison in 2001 when he was working on an Eritrean newspaper. All editors and reporters were interrogated and locked up for six months without being charged before a court of law. They were all tortured in an attempt to force them to sign a confession to subversive activity against the Eritrean government. None of them succumbed. His editor in chief died during the torture.
After spending three years in prison, he escaped with two other journalists and fled to Sudan. He arrived in Uganda in October of last year as he is on the run again from Sudan because he was documenting the human rights violations committed in refugee camps in Darfur.
This man is truly passionate and determined to fight for freedom of expression for journalists. He is campaigning for the Eritrean President to release the journalists that are still detained.
His testimony did put the current Ugandan problems with press freedom in perspective. Journalists are not degraded and restricted to the same extent currently, but the way the government has dealt with recent events and with their plans to suppress freedom of expression further, the situation may well deteriorate.
When professional journalists and radio stations are shut down in controversial times, it is the Ugandan blogging community that can keep freedom of speech alive, informing others of what is happening. With blogs and twitter and other forms of social media, then the ‘truth’, or at least varying perspectives, will reach the people of Uganda.
