“All the children have adapted so well to their home, they live in harmony and treat each other with dignity. The big girls are always willing to help their young sisters and give them the love and care they need. They have taken the home to be their own and suggest how they want it improved, presented and represented.”
- Anthony Mulongo, founder, Mudzini Kwetu
Sopra:
“I get to go to school and play and clean and practice so as when I grow up I can do everything. I want to be a pilot”
Jenny:
“It is good here, but I miss my mother. I love my mother.”
Brenda:
“The people here show us love.” (Brenda graduates school this year and wants to be a lawyer).
Gift:
“We help the younger ones when they come and are bad. We help them to be good. It feels really nice to help them change. Sometimes they come and won’t do anything but then they become different. Anthony is kind and treats us well, he is very good with all the girls.”
We and the girls really want you get to know them, but our primary responsibility is their well-being. So to protect the girls from school friends — or others in their life — reading of their traumatic and personal early experiences that they may not have shared, we have withheld their names where appropriate. We hope that you understand. And we thank you for taking the girls from these horrific beginnings to a hopeful future.
S. – Forced marriage
S. is a teenage girl who was forced to marry when she was just ten years old. She has suffered from physical and sexual abuse, but is now happily settled at Mudzini Kwetu and is attending school for the first time.
Agnes and Macharia – The Life and Death Reality Agnes
“When I visited in August 2007, there were 33 girls and one boy. Six weeks later there were only 33 girls. This is life and death we’re talking about,” recounts Thomas Keown of ‘One Home Many Hopes’. “Seven-month-old twins, Agnes and Macharia, arrived at the home three weeks before I got there. They were on the verge of death.”
“Their father wasn’t known and their mother had gone on a drinking binge, leaving them unattended and screaming with hunger for three days in the slum area of Mtwapa. Neighbors heard their cries and found them starving and ridden with lice and worse. They called the police.”
“Two officers took the tiny pair to Anthony and eventually located the mother. Still drunk on a very cheap but very strong local liquor, she told them, ‘Save the girl if you want, but throw the boy in the dustbin. He’s not going to survive anyway.’ So weak were the babies that the volunteer doctor was afraid to draw blood for 14 days.”
“Despite over two months of gentle love and medical care, the mother’s prediction proved accurate and, in late October 2007, little Macharia was lost. I haven’t held many babies in my life, but the thought that I have outlived one of them is horrible. In so far as there can be any positive side to this tragedy it is that, thanks to Mudzini Kwetu, Macharia was able to experience love and care for a few short weeks that otherwise he would have died without knowing. And that we may be redoubled in our commitment to stopping such senseless stories being lived again.”
K., A. and R. – A Story of Three Sisters
Born into hunger and a fatherless home, life wasn’t much for K., A. and R. to begin with. But when their mother succumbed to AIDS in 2006, the nothing they had became much less. K., the eldest, become sole provider for a six-year-old and a one-year-old. She was 12. For six months, the three sisters slept and woke on the streets, eating whatever K. could find on the ground and in the garbage. All so they could survive to do it again tomorrow.
By the end of the year they were picked up by the police and joined other children like them in juvenile prison. With no social safety net in Kenya, they were punished for being poor simply because there is nowhere else to put street children. Mudzini Kwetu advocated for the sisters in court but the judge didn’t want to release K. Calloused by the hardship of survival, she was deemed ‘destructive’ and would, in the opinion of the judge, be a bad influence on the girls already there. Mudzini refused to give up and, with the help of a volunteer attorney, had the sisters released to the home’s care six months later. Today K. helps new girls, who may be arriving as hostile as she once was, settle into their new home. She loves because she was first loved.
Brenda – Studying Hard
Brenda is another of the older girls. She is studying hard for the Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE), which she must pass in order to move on to her secondary education. Examinations are of major importance in the entrance requirements for secondary school. Many of the older girls have received very little formal education and remain in lower classes until they reach the required standard.
Gift The First
Gift Hawa was six years old and her brother only 10 months when AIDS killed their mother in early 2000. Without a father, Gift was her young sibling’s only hope. But six-year-olds are not supposed to be mothers, and her brother’s needs proved greater than a child could meet. While carrying him through the backstreets of Mombasa, the young boy died on her back during a search for food.
Anthony Mulongo had met the Hawa family during a work assignment in Mombasa and, hearing about their mother’s death upon his return to Nairobi, tracked them down. He was too late to save her brother but transported Gift to Nairobi, moved her into his house, and enrolled her in school. It was the start of Mudzini Kwetu. Today there are 35 girls. Gift, now a teenager, is mentor to many.
“…and a little child shall lead them.”
Isaiah 11:6
