gosmile uganda

Providing Education to Orphaned Children through Individual Donors

In communities such as ours, as many as one in every five children does not live to celebrate his or her fifth birthday. Children under five are extremely susceptible to disease, hunger, and exposure. At least 1 in 20 is carrying the HIV virus and will need medicine for the inevitable opportunistic diseases that will result. The cost will be out of reach for these children.

Many of our village children who are orphaned or abandoned have no access to an education and cannot even depend on one meal a day. These children have nothing to do and many times can be found roaming the villages looking for work and scavenging garbage. If they can find work, the hours are long and the wages are little resulting in other activities such as pick-pocketing, begging, and vending small goods. Malnutrition, sexual exploitation, and guardian abuse are common in the lives of most of these children. Some are in the care of siblings just a year or two older. Even those taken in by relatives or neighbors can face hunger. The overwhelming number of orphans can stretch a community’s meager food resources past the limit. Many are HIV+ acquired from mother-to-child transmission at birth or due to breast-feeding shortly afterwards. Eventually these children lose hope that their lives will ever change and that anyone even cares. Many will become reckless with their lives and get involved with petty crimes, drug use and early pregnancy.