Agness Nandutu
4 October 2007
column
Kampala — An eight-day old baby boy lies at Sanyu babies' Home. The healthy-looking child was dumped at Kawaala, Kasubi in Kampala. Fortunately, he was found alive and taken to Sanyu Babies' Home by a probation officer. For now, the baby is sure to grow without the presence of biological parents and will obviously not enjoy his mother's breast milk.
This is just one of the several cases at the children's home located in Mengo. When MPs on the Uganda Parliamentary Forum for Children (UPFC) visited the home last week, there were 47 children aged between eight days to three years at the home. The younger ones were comfortably in baby beds while the older ones could be seen playing in the resting rooms and classes. The team of MPs, led by their chairperson, Ms Ruth Tuma, were on a two-day tour of children's homes to assess the living conditions and lobby the government to support them.
The staff at Sanyu Babies Home are nurses, mothers and teachers who make sure the children feel at home.
In their beds, resting rooms and classes, the children, most of them abandoned in different areas, wear bright innocent smiles on their faces.
The mothers employed by the home seem determined to give these children the life and future they deserve. The children seemed to have adapted to their new homes. In the corridors of the home, they can be seen running around and playing with their new caretaker mothers.
Rev. Florence Namala, an administrator at the home, told MPs that most of the babies were dumped immediately after birth. "They are either brought by the probation officers, local leaders or well wishers to this home.
Some of them are picked from hospitals and others dumped right in front of our gate," she said. "Despite the circumstances in which these children are found, they have finally found a home," said Rev. Namala.
Some of these children are believed to be products of adulterous couples who do not want to destroy their marriages by owning them up. Many are allegedly abandoned because their mothers were disowned by the responsible men tend to disown the pregnancies. Some mothers who try to bring them up but fail midway are also responsible for some of the abandoned children.
Such children have found their home on the streets in many urban areas. Rev. Namala explained that some children are picked from hospitals after their mothers die and nobody claims them.
Immediately they receive the children, they take them to hospitals to test their health status. Unfortunately, some of them are found with the HIV/Aids virus. The sick ones are reportedly treated and for those in more serious conditions who may need special care, Rev. Namala says they refer them to Child Aid in Masaka, an NGO that caters for children living with HIV/Aids.
In many urban areas in Uganda now, many children are being abandoned.
Caring adults, police officers and local leaders save many of these babies by taking them to babies' homes. However, many who are abandoned die of illness, injuries, hunger, thirst, heat or cold. Sanyu Babies' Home was the first charitable organisation that was founded by Ms Winfred Walker in 1929 to care for abandoned, orphaned and destitute children.
Ms Walker, who was then a nurse at Mengo Hospital, reportedly founded the home after witnessing many children languishing in the hospital after their mothers intentionally abandon them or die and no body claims them.
Today, the home boasts of bringing up some of the children into responsible adults and public figures in society.
Sanyu Babies' Home takes care of children from the age of one day to six months.
They encourage well-wishers to adopt the children and many have done so. If they are not adopted by the age of four years, they are referred to either Watoto or any other organisation that caters for children.
Rev. Namala told MPs that the government has not done enough to help such children. She said the organisation depends on donor aid yet the children belong to the country.
"The government even taxes the old clothes sent from overseas for these children. Sometimes we end up paying a lot of money, not worth the old clothes," she said.
The MPs promised to have discussions with the Ministry of Gender to ensure that they take children as a priority.
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