MCK Meru/Kaaga Street Children’s Project
Administrator Bishop George Mbaya
Secretary Faith Murungi
Senior Social Worker Lydia
About 150 miles north of Nairobi, the Trust is supporting both a residential home in Kaaga for children who used to live on the streets and an outreach/feeding/teaching programme for children living in poverty with carers in Meru Town.
MERU CHILDREN’S HOME, KAAGA
This is the only children’s home in the Methodist Church in Kenya and was opened on 14 November 1999. There are 55 children – 25 of whom are attending the local Mwithumwiru Primary School; 26 children are in Secondary School, and 4 in further education, including one at Maua Methodist Hospital training to be a nurse, Maureen, who has just completed her first year of nurse-training and achieved the highest marks, not just for her year, but ever at the hospital!
The home was built mainly by Kenya Children’s Foundation (KCF) with £40,000 from Karibuni Trust. An excellent hostel has also been built by KCF, where there are rooms for 20 adolescent youngsters to live fairly independently. There is a kitchen, dining/common room plus computer room and library.
There are 13 staff – the Administrator, a Social Worker, housemothers, housefather!handymen, secretary, cooks, cowmen and watchmen. They have their own farm growing maize, bananas and most vegetables, a posho mill which is income generating, cows and several calves.
There is limited support from other external donors and little support locally. The premises are magnificent and the local people see this and think there must be lots of money available, feel their own children are far worse off than the former street children, and therefore see no need to support the home.
MERU TOWNSHIP PROGRAMME
This programme started as a feeding and teaching programme at the Gakoromone Methodist Church in Meru Town before there was free primary education. None of the children were able to go to school; most of them were homeless and lived on the streets – the children in the children′s home came from this pool of children. Since the introduction of free primary education homes have been found for the 80 children in the programme with extended family members and all of them are in school. The project is now based at the Catholic Consolata Mission School (CCM) where they have an old classroom and kitchen, which have been improved by Karibuni work groups.
Karibuni Trust supports 50 children in Primary School, 30 in Secondary Schools, both day and boarding schools; and the salaries for 1 full-time and 1 part-time cook. There is a Saturday programme of feeding and education and we try to support the carers, most of whom are HIV+ve. We also support work among these women who are developing a market garden – food for the pot and to sell. The women have started a small ‘merry-go-round’ finance scheme from which they can all borrow money for small business purposes. They need a micro-finance scheme. Through Gifts to share the joy of giving, several now have goats and others have chickens; and these numbers increase each year.
