On the Sunday during recent training with LEMA (Life Edifying Ministries Africa) in Busia and Mbale, Uganda, I was able to fellowship and preach at the Lumino Discipleship Church in the morning and then visit the LEMA Hope Centre (LHC) in the afternoon.
The LEMA Hope Centre is looking after 25 children who had been living and sleeping on the streets in Busia. The project, supported by Comfort International, provides the children with accommodation at the LHC, their meals and fees for school. It is a full-time home for the children looked after by a team of 6, most who are volunteers. The team function very much as the parents of the children and work hard to love, care for and discipline the children.
The common situation is that of fathers fearing their responsibilities and running away and hiding from their wife and children, which often results in the wife remarrying, the step-father rejecting or abusing the child(ren) and the child then running from home onto the streets.
The children are looking well and are obviously well cared for. The LHC has recently moved and the new location has an area at the back where the children can play which is clearly beneficial. They are doing well at school with good marks. It was also heartening to hear that they were free from the addictions to glue, thinner, alcohol, drugs etc. that they had before entry to the project.
Socially, spiritually and physically they appear to be thriving although they are still children recovering from a traumatic life and on occasion exhibit difficult behaviour. The team clearly care deeply about the children and it was good to see the obvious love and affection the children felt for them too. We had a game of football, boys versus girls with me adding to the girls’ side but my football skills are obviously past their best as we were beaten two goals to one!
There are thirteen children sponsored and we really need the other twelve to be sponsored too, as well as some project supporters (people who support the project but don’t have an allocated sponsorship), as looking after the children full-time at the Hope Centre goes quite far beyond resources even if all the kids were sponsored. The team at the LEMA Hope Centre talked about the challenges in providing expensive health-care beyond basic first aid, and the increased costs of education as children move up classes in school. At present the children have no beds and are just sleeping on mattresses on the floor.
There are two house parents, Bathsheba and Okedi Vincent, who make sure the children are well looked after. After visiting the children at the LEMA Hope Centre, Okedi Vincent, who is a pastor in Busia in an area very close the Kenyan border called Sofia, took me to visit the area after dark. It was from this area that the children on the project had come and it was Vincent’s church that Lea Shaw had visited and met some of the children. We were accompanied by some street children that Vincent had brought to the LHC that afternoon and they had shared some of the food the LHC children were eating for lunch. Some of those street children shared how they were sleeping in the forest, others on waste ground and some just at the side of the road.
It was after dark when we arrived in Sofia, an area of marked poverty. The street children showed us where they slept at night – behind buildings on waste ground, on the concrete paving under shop verandas, simply lying down at the side of roads with their heads on cardboard boxes. The children were as young as four years old. Other street children who joined us were sniffing paint thinner and drinking alcohol and some young children were clearly heavily under the influence. All the children spoke of their hunger – finding food was a constant gnawing struggle. They also spoke of how much they wanted to be on the project and live at the LEMA Hope Centre like the project children.
Vincent took me to his church – it was just a rudimentary shelter with a tin roof held up by wooden poles and no walls or floor, but it was where quite a few of the street children slept at night. Some children were arriving to get ready to sleep that night and it was clear some had not eaten that day. It was tough saying goodbye to those children knowing their situation was still unresolved. As I made my way home through Sofia there were several other groups of street children, some of them clearly running from irate shop/stall holders from whom they had stolen food.
If you have friends or relatives or church members who have a heart for homeless street children do encourage them to sponsor a child. You or they can find eleven children needing sponsorship at https://comfortinternational.org/sponsorship-portal/Â . We would so love to take more children onto the project. There was a four-year-old girl just sleeping in weeds at the side of the road, robbed of a future as a child of four but with no space on the project until we get more sponsors. If you can encourage someone to sponsor, we can then take those children onto the project and trust God will heal their hearts and give them a hope and a future in His love and purpose.
Please pray hard for this project. With many children still on the streets we need it to grow quickly and for the team to have a real anointing on their lives to bring healing and wholeness to those children.
