08/08/2017
Bitter Success Story Nr. 1
[Before beginning with one of our bitter success stories, we want to point out that we try to not mention the names of our protagonists to protect them from bullying or worse. Nevertheless, are all stories true and provide a glimpse in the life of our schoolkids and the efforts of HOPSYG.]
In the year 2009 after a careful recruitment exercise of needy and orphan kids in Mshomoroni Kenya, the girl below was one of the kids admitted to Hope orphan pre-school (currently now abbreviated as Hopsyg Junior School). At the age of five years she repeatedly got sick. Having lost her Dad and mum and living with her grandmother who was uneducated, we as a
school took the responsibility of taking her to a hospital to seek medical intervention. Upon arriving at the hospital, the resident doctor immediately suspected her with a serious health condition.
For the first 3 months Madam Fatma voluntarily administered her the medication she needed. One of the pictures below shows our protagonist at 4 years during recruitment. Another shows her at our school with the rest of the preschool students.
The next step was finding a boarding orphanage school.
Hopsyg was at that time and is still a day school and our schoolgirl was not getting a balanced diet at home and also the monitoring of medication during holidays was not promising and she was still pretty weak during that time.
Although the process of getting her admitted to an orphanage was very long, tedious and bureaucratic, finally a break came up in the form of Tumaini Orphanage in Bamburi which provided excellent care including nurses. This was our protagonists home for seven years. Below is a picture of her and Fred at Tumaini children’s home during a family visiting day, most of which she only received visits from Alan, Fred and volunteer Johannes, but not any one from her blood family because of stigmatization and abject poverty.
2017 is the year of another paradigm shift again in our student’s life. Now looking much more mature compared to the little girl we saw during recruitment, as it is evident from the two contradicting pictures below.
At the end of 2016, Hopsyg School, acting as guardians of our protagonist, decided to visit her Aunts and blood Cousins to look into why they had never visited or inquired of how she was doing for almost seven years despite our relentless requests year by year.
Through this effort we managed to bring our student to know her blood family of which she had already forgotten, since she was very young the last time they saw each other. It was only during the last December holiday when she was very exited again in her
life for meeting and being acquainted once again with her long-lost family, but this
impacted negatively to her educational progress. Schools opened Jan 2017 and she
didn’t want to go back to the orphanage, even after getting counselling numerously on the importance of education. Despite all these efforts she still went on to sneak back home without the Orphanage school official permission. Due to the risk, she caused to the school’s management and to her fellow students, the school had no choice but to expel her before any harm befell her albeit the school’s management still made a point to follow up on her health progress. The pictures below of Tumaini Staff talking to our protagonist’s aunt, just after expelling her from the program and dropping her at home.
Now after staying home for one term, Hopysg staff decided to visit the girl where we
realized she felt very connected to her blood family. Also, she accepted to come back to
day school at Hopsyg from which she started off at the age of 4 years, seven years ago.
Pictures below of our grown-up girl in the yellow t-shirt now in class at our program again. We fully support her free education while modelling her future just like the other cases we have. We currently fully sponsor 80 students at our school.
