For $500 a year, a sponsor in the U.S. is able to pay for primary school fees, books, school supplies, school uniforms, and an annual physical evaluation. Emergency food bags of maize are provided where necessary. The sponsor receives reports on his/her sponsored orphan. In the last five years, AIDS (which is spread in Kenya exclusively by sexual means) has become a massive epidemic. It has reduced the Luo people, which used to be the third largest group in Kenya, to the fourth largest. Wherever you go in western Kenya, you will see people either going to or coming from a funeral; the morgues, where they exist, are always full. A family compound, which might have contained six or eight kin-related families, each in its own hut, now may have three or four totally empty huts. The remaining families have taken in the survivors and have to support them. The epidemic has produced 600,000 orphans in Kenya as of this date, and the numbers are rising rapidly; these are children who do not have AIDS themselves; they have been orphaned by the deaths of both their parents from AIDS. Kenya is not alone in this disaster; Uganda already has 1.2 million orphans. The numbers are so enormous that it is hard for anyone who has not been to these countries to picture the situation as it is.
In the province of Nyanza in western Kenya, when both parents die of AIDS, what happens to their child? There are various possibilities. The child may be taken into a relative’s home; this may or may not have a good outcome. In a poor home, the additional child is a burden and may not fare as well as the children already there. In particular, there may be no money to send an extra child to school. So, such a child ends up working in the home and receives no education. Or, if he is old enough or able enough, the child may be able to continue farming or fishing and so make his own living. Children mature early there; the girls are often married by age thirteen or fourteen. Or, worst of all, the child may have no external sup-port whatsoever; such a child is likely to end up on the streets of the local town or a larger city and beg, steal, or become a prostitute in order to live. The large cities of Kenya (Mombassa, Nairobi, and Kisumu) have many such street children. One often sees a child of eight or nine years carrying a two-year old sibling piggyback and begging from passers-by.
It is pitiful indeed to enter a hut and see a sixty-five- year-old grandmother who has just lost her grown children to AIDS and who now has to assume the duties of mother and father to her grandchildren. She herself may not be well, her capacity to earn a living at this stage in her life may be limited. But the scene in the hut is not rare. One out of three adults has HIV. Young adults are dying right and left, leaving their families behind. These are not drug addicts; they are decent, hard-working people and they are being wiped out by this epidemic.
SHARE began its first efforts at helping, two to three years ago, by building an orphanage. This worked out well; Double Joy Farm is functioning and has about one hundred orphans. But as the numbers of orphans grew astronomically, it be-came evident that maintaining them in their home villages would enable us to support many more orphans and at the same time ensure that their ties with relatives and friends would be preserved.. To this end, we started our SOS program, which is an adopt-an-orphan program. For $500 a year, a sponsor in the United States is able to pay for primary school fees, books, school supplies, school uniforms, and an annual physical examination and health evaluation. In addition, emergency funds are available through the program to pay for the occasional roof that needs repair or for an extra bag of maize if drought makes this necessary. The sponsor receives reports on his/her sponsored orphan and can exchange letters and photos with the orphan if he/she wishes to do so.
The program has taken off like a sky-rocket and we hope it continues this way. The need is so great, and the contrast between their need and our plenty is so huge that many people are drawn to this simple, easy way to help. The commitment is for a minimum of one year’s sponsorship; of course, we hope each sponsor will re-new at the end of each year, or even better, commit to more than one year at a time. The situation is not all bleak, for this small amount of money can go a long way. School fees that seem as tall as a mountain to a Kenyan are really very little in dollars. We have almost one hundred sponsored children at this time and we hope to expand the program to include hundreds more. The need is great.