Stories from the Field

HCI presents the Child Sponsorship Program; the case of Majd from Gaza

HCI presents the Child Sponsorship Program; the case of Abdel Rahman and Bara’ Hashem from Lebanon

The number of orphans and children from single mother-headed households in Sudan has risen dramatically over the past few years due to war, natural disasters, and other crises. Poverty and economic hardship also have added to children born out of wedlock who, according to Sudanese law, are considered orphans. Since 2003, HCI has been addressing this problem by sponsoring orphans in Sudan as part of HCI’s regional Child Sponsorship Program. There now are over 140 orphans from Sudan’s poorest communities having their basic needs met–health care, nutrition, education, guidance–getting a shot at a brighter future.

Building on HCI’s extensive regional experience in orphan sponsorship, HCI has been exploring new ways to reduce immediate needs of orphans and to create greater opportunities for their future progress.

Entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly accepted as an important means and a useful alternative for income generation in young people, particularly in the developing world. As traditional job-for-life career paths become rarer, youth entrepreneurship is regarded as an additional way of integrating youth into the labor market and overcoming poverty. For orphans, entrepreneurship is a bottom-up method for generating an income, self-reliance and a new innovative path to earning a living and caring for oneself. More importantly, when these end-results are met, the psychological health of the orphans improves; when orphans, for the first time, generate an income and develop self-reliance, they are going to feel worthy, confident, and self-confident.

Furthermore, the majority of orphans, especially children from single mother-headed households living at home, rely heavily on financial and in-kind assistance from either better-off individuals or from institutions. Such children become passive receivers of charity, meaning that they rarely get the chance to explore and build on their capacity. With such mindset, such children rarely try, at older age, to make the leap from survival to long term sustainability by investing in entrepreneurship. The reason behind this is not only the fact that they rely on charity every month and thus feel no pressure to work, but also because they have been passive receivers for such a long time that they have lost the mental readiness to actually build progress on their personalities. These children, as adults, no longer believe that they can be productive - they lose self-confidence.

It is October, there is a group of fifteen teenagers gathered together eagerly taking notes, we are in one of HCI’s entrepreneurship classes held in Sudan, these eight girls and seven boys’ lives are about to change; they are one of many groups of orphaned youth to be selected for HCI’s program. In a series of six three-hour classes, they are cultivating a positive attitude towards entrepreneurship, developing entrepreneurship within the group, getting a deeper understanding of running a business, receiving hands-on entrepreneurship training, testing their business ideas under realistic circumstances, and most importantly, getting “a sense of and feeling for” entrepreneurship and business by implementing the concept of “Business for a day” in which they are asked to carry out a spontaneous business activity, which is subsequently evaluated.

Alia is one of these students; She lives with her mother in a makeshift house made from bits of plastic & aluminum, her father and brothers were killed several years ago in the bloody civil unrest that plagues the country. She is one of the many internally displaced people that have fled the violence in the south of the country and live in the slum-like settlements around Khartoum. The only opportunity she has to improve her life is the education and the help she receive through HCI’s sponsorship program. Even though she is just seventeen, she is already full of business ideas, she tells us that she is learning a lot from the classes and is excited to start her own business; “there is no running water in our area, the women have to trek for 45 minutes to the nearest well to fetch water every morning. If I take out a micro loan, I will be able to buy a donkey and use it to carry water from the well and sell it to the women in the settlement. By doing this way the girls in the settlement will have more time to go to school and learn”.

There are thousands of young people like Alia in Sudan, needing a just little bit of guidance and a small push in the right direction in order to unlock their full potential and build up the confidence to develop their own livelihoods; after all the visions we offer our children shape the future.

In May 2009, the HCI team launched two projects in Sudan that will provide credit capital and the necessary training and coaching to two new communities in two settlements in the south and the north of the capital Khartoum as well as a project which will promote entrepreneurial spirit among impoverished Sudanese orphans, and giving them the proper training in setting up and managing their own small businesses. Human Concern International has always made an effort to work with poor communities in Sudan; with 2 million Sudanese at risk of death, in addition to those who have been injured, displaced and have lost all of their support and care networks due to the continues civil unrest, poverty and lack of proper infrastructure, one should feel concerned. The living conditions in these settlements are extremely unsafe; while visiting the community leaders, we witnessed the cruel effect of poverty on people; in these two settlements people had built their houses from scrap metal, water was insufficient and unclean, sanitation services were nonexistent and the scarcity of food was visible on the children, someone even pointed out those dying from malnutrition.

This difficult image that we witnessed will soon be changing with these projects that were launched in partnership with several local long-time partners in Sudan, including Peace and Development Volunteers (PDV) and African Charity for Child and Mother Care (ACCSOM). One project will assist the rebuilding of Sudanese lives through micro credit, and provide access to finance programs for low-income Sudanese widows. The second project aims to unlock and unleash the economic potential of Sudan’s orphans that HCI has been sponsoring since 2003. Through the micro-credit initiative: 100 widows will receive loans for income generation and small businesses, 2 revolving loan programs will be established and will be operated by local communities, 2 local credit committees will be established at two targeted communities, and 16 people at two local credit committees will receive training in basic credit provision.

The second project’s objective is to assist orphans shift their mindset from being passive receivers of donations to active income generating entrepreneurs. Instead of being drawn into a passive cycle of receiving charity and relying on the kindness of others, 30 orphans will receive the training and materials necessary to embark on their own business ventures. They will also be given the opportunity to test their ideas under real-life circumstances, and take part in the “Business for a Day” program, in which they will operate a business for one day. An investment club, run by the orphans, will be set up. The club will be endowed with a trust fund, which will be invested towards implementing club activities. Thirty orphans, fourteen years of age and older, will take part in the first phase of the program.

The implementation of these two projects will provide the solid ground on which these widows and orphans can build their lives on, where the knowledge and the technical assistance will be provided by the project’s workshops and volunteer trainers and the revolving funds and loans will be in the hand of their own community to make use of, nurture and pass on to other needy members of their community to slowly but effectively reduce poverty levels within these two settlements.

Our field visits were not only to launch new projects, but to also follow up and connect with other local partners in these two settlements, where HCI has long been implementing relief and development projects that offer Sudanese orphans economic security through the child sponsorship program; where devastated, left out and marginalized orphans are given access to food, security and education throughout their sponsorship period. Our local partners took us to a library that HCI helped establish, where many of the sponsored children are able to have access to knowledge and information.

During the same visit, HCI and the Canada-based International Development and Relief Foundation (IDRF) launched a new interesting initiative in Sudan, related to International Water & Sanitation (IWS) and targeted in the first phase at building the capacity of Canadian international institutions in this area of technical assistance. To have a better understanding of the situation, HCI will prepare a comprehensive country analytical report in partnership with HCI local partner, Peace and Development Volunteers (PDV). The result of the report should formulate the ground in which HCI and other Canadian based organizations can implement large-scale interventions in Sudan to ensure water sufficiency, and opportunities for related income generating activities. Projects like these are vital and have the potential to fundamentally change many lives, especially in impoverished settlements like these ones. HCI also witnessed the launching of a new civil society-public partnership for the provision of family-based health insurance that our partners are engaged in.

In the last part of our very dynamic and productive field visit, we also got the chance to visit the health clinic that was established with the help of HCI to serve the new settlements in northern Khartoum. The health clinic has outstandingly been operating autonomously, self sufficiently and effectively to serve the population with a professional team of health experts that are semi volunteering to cover the health needs of the area, from treating chronic illnesses to dental care. During our visit at the clinic, we came across a group of young boys in the process of being circumcised; our local partners explained the importance of having such traditional operations take place in a clinic by the hands of medical practitioners, instead of having them done the traditional way in an unsanitary environment that often yields harmful outcomes. Wandering around the clinic, we were content to see the staff operating professionally; taking care of the patients and maintaining the medical equipment to make sure that as many people as possible are able to benefit from it.

It was a busy week in the field in Sudan, but those few days have made us more confident after seeing the efforts of our local partners to sustain themselves and sustain project impacts and use all the available opportunities to help their communities. As the humanitarian situation in Sudan is deteriorating, HCI feels obliged to double the efforts to provide immediate relief to those who are in need, especially those that are most vulnerable; orphans and widows.

Two jobs were created at the Al Mona center for hearing imparities & mental development in Tripoli the week that Yazan, a member of the fundraising team in Canada visited the HCI team in Lebanon. The center, a subsidiary of the Charity of the Islamic Women Society was where the first meal of HCI’s Farm to School program was served to schoolchildren in Lebanon. Farm to school brings healthy food from small local low-income farms to underprivileged school children at schools located in low-income areas. Vulnerable women, particularly widows and women with special needs are employed to prepare these meals and the targeted local farmers are given agricultural support and assistance to improve their economic stability. The center’s students were served a nutritionist designed meal of locally produced organic sautéed green beans and beef served with rice and a yoghurt salad, with an apple each for dessert. “The kids enjoyed the meal and were really happy to be able to play with each other and make new friends afterwards” Inaam Aloosh, the president of the CIWS told us as we toured the premises and witnessed the students happily engaged in their lessons despite the many challenges they are faced with. The Al Mona center has been a longtime local partner of HCI and hundreds of children with special needs have been able to benefit from many of the facilities secured by HCI such as equipment for testing hearing abilities and a psychomotricity room that helps the children coordinate the movement of their bodies with their brains.

We drive away from Tripoli northwards until neighborhoods are replaced by slums; grimy and bare concrete homes in disrepair randomly layered over each other and navigable only by uneven dirt paths. We have reached Beddawi, our second destination for the day. We are here to visit Mona; a widow and a single mother of nine. Her son Abdel Hadi is one of the many orphans aided by HCI’s child sponsorship program. She runs a tiny dimly lit grocery shop which also includes a sewing machine in the corner that allows her to double as a seamstress “I am barely able to make ends meet on my own; Beddawi is a very poor area, there is hardly any work here, I don’t know what I would have done without the child sponsorship program” she says to us as we sit in her modest home waiting for Abdel Hadi and his siblings to arrive from school (despite her difficult situation, she makes sure that all the children get an education).

When we enquire about how Abdel Hadi has been doing, she tells us that thanks to the his sponsorship he has recently been able to have surgery done in one eye to enable him to see better and will have the other one operated on soon. When he eventually arrives he greets us shyly and tells us about his day at school, he looks healthy and happy; it was worth the long bumpy journey to see his radiant smile. As he runs off to have lunch with his siblings we also remember that we have to head out to our next destination as well.

El Minieh is our next destination; we are here to visit Houriyeh, a widowed mother of two and a beneficiary of one of HCI’s micro credit programs. She welcomes us warmly and serves us chilled glasses of delicious fresh yogurt and tells us the story of how the yogurt came into being; “three years ago after my husband’s death, it was up to me to take care of the children on my own. I had heard of small microcredit loans that were being made available by HCI through a local partner and I decided to apply for one and buy a cow”. With this cow she was able to set up a small household dairy business that supplies the local community with fresh milk and yogurt. In addition to this, the manure produced by the cow is also bought by local farmers to be used as a natural fertilizer. Her cow eventually gave birth and she was able to sell the calf and settle her loan. It is amazing to witness firsthand how such a small sum of money has been able to impact this family’s life so positively; she tells us that thanks to this one cow she has been able to provide for her children and complete the construction of the house that her husband had started building before his death. We are impressed to learn that the yoghurt salad that was served at the first Farm to School meal in Tripoli was made of yoghurt provided by Houriyeh.

Our final destination for the day is in the Mhamra agricultural area; it is close to the Nahr Al Bared camp and was heavily affected by stray shelling from the 2007 Nahr Al Bared Conflict resulting in the loss of many harvests which dealt a crippling blow to the local farmers that are already caught in vicious cycles of debt. We are here to visit Khodor, one of these local farmers. Khodor and his six brothers own a small farm that they struggle to survive from.

He tells us that he has been engaged for about six years now and will continue to be unable to get married until he manages to save up enough money to build a small home for his future wife and himself to start a family in. Right now the siblings and their families live together in a small modest house on the farm and their priority is keeping the farm productive as it is their only source of income. As part of HCI’s agriculture extension services project, Khodor’s land is being reviewed by a team of volunteer agricultural engineers to determine what can be done to improve its economic stability. It has been a long day, we have seen a lot. It is time for us to head back to Beirut to prepare for the next day.

We head southwards towards Nabatiye the next day to visit another one of HCI’s local partners: Tamkeen Association for Independent Living, which is a nonprofit non sectarian and non political entity that takes care of the disabled and works on their rehabilitation. They have been around since 1987 and HCI has had a long and active history with them: some of the many projects implemented by HCI include equipping the special education center, early intervention center and the physiotherapy treatment center for rehabilitation of disabled people (particularly landmine victims), securing emergency relief funds for those affected by the July 1996 war and the numerous conflicts the area has seen, a landmine and unexploded ordnance danger awareness program and a micro loan program for disabled people and their families among others. HCI’s latest project with Tamkeen is to provide agricultural backyard production assistance to the physically disabled; the importance of this project lies in the fact that the handicapped are able to secure an income through micro farming outside their houses, without the need to commute placing them on the path towards self sustainability and improving their self esteem. Until now 10 people with special needs have been given support via HCI to help improve the viability of their backyard farms.

As we are shown around the center we meet Ali and Abdallah. Nine year old Ali was born without legs and until a few weeks ago had spent his entire life moving around on a wheelchair. Now, thanks to artificial limbs secured by Tamkeen, he is overjoyed to be learning to walk for the first time in his life. Eight year old Abdalla, on the other hand lost his leg a few weeks ago when he inadvertently stepped on an unexploded ordnance while playing in a field near his home. He too will be provided with an artificial limb once his injuries fully heal. As we visit the different classrooms and meet more of the special needs children, we can’t help but admire the spirit the challenged show in the face of adversity and a feel a deep sense of gratitude and respect towards all the individuals and organizations that dedicate their time and efforts to make positive change and empowerment come into fruition.

As we drive Yazan to Beirut, we excitedly discuss new ideas that have started to bud as a result of our collective experiences coming together on the field. The visit has come to an end. We say our goodbyes and though we head off in different directions, our goals remain the same.

“My name is Abeer.

I snuck into the pocket space under the stairs and settled on a worn rubber tire. I took into myself a rusty-bladed knife in a box of wood shavings, and watched the crystal bubbles in clear olive-oil jugs, and mourned.

My fuzz-head torn-shorts brother sat cross-legged on the ground beside me, and he held my hand in his so brown, scab-kneed little urchin thinking thoughts deep by the rusty-handled hoes. We sat, us two, drifting between time and place, the air so still and dry it burned our skins- but did not burn the hurt engraved underneath-sitting amidst ruins of an ancient town, already forgetful of the fairy foot-falls of elfin children, the glorious frivolity in their pearly-toothed grins.

I inched close wondering- it was the first reverberating life motion, memories in this garden-climbing a shiny-leafed fig tree- Tripoli, Lebanon, and the scorching abyss of the dark planting hole, seeds dropped down deep, nothing shaded, only burnt-black bright migraine-sun-and brown-skinned children sitting hollow-eyed each on a ladder rung propped up against a pomegranate tree, dread in small hands gripping splintery wood, watching the dust settle amidst the rubble of a now-sky-roofed house.

My father is dead. My home, it is ruined, racked by the explosion that took so much away from us. Our family is destitute, our basic needs for food, clothing, shelter- they are all unmet. It is with despair we look to the future. We are deprived of the paternal care that gives us good homes and a chance at a decent education. We are deprived of the capable love that can erase the dread we face our future with, bring back the frivolity in our smiles and set our lives moving again in a direction where we will not have to watch the dust settle over our ruin.

But there is a beacon of hope. My little brother, Ahmed, only 5 years old, has been sponsored by HCI for two years now. It is the only source of income for my family now.”

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