Special Needs Equipment In Kenya

Heshima (“dignity” in Swahili) Mission Statement: Through the love of Jesus Christ, we provide dignity for disabled children and their families. We believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and that He calls His disciples to serve the poor. “Truly I tell you, whatever you do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Mathew 25:40) Currently, we have 3 main goals at Heshima. 1) Provide therapy, special education, nutrition and medical coverage to poverty-stricken children that have special needs. Due to lack of education, many Kenyans believe that a person with a disability is “cursed”. The community does not tolerate them and rejects these families. The Kenyan schools have no special education programs and there is no public assistance for these families. Currently, we have 40 children in our program and each of them receives therapy and special education Monday-Friday. We pay for medical needs that the children have while at Heshima. Most of our kids have cerebral palsy, which affects the brain; because of this, they require many doctor visits. We provide HIV testing and counseling.  We provide medications (seizures, malaria, typhoid, ringworm, antibiotics). We have covered the costs of 4 clubbed foot surgeries in the last 5 years at a local hospital. These 4 children are now walking. We provide daily food for each child?2 hot meals per day plus a snack.  All of these families come from extreme poverty and many of our kids are malnourished when they first come to Heshima. We provide equipment for them to bring into their village homes: leg braces, walkers, wheelchairs, crutches, etc. These families do not have money to buy such things and they are not easily available. 2) Provide a job for each one of the mothers of these disabled children; currently, we employ 35 moms. We raise money to pay these ladies a salary to work on the Heshima campus. Most of these moms have never been employed. They are often illiterate as well as HIV positive. This, combined with rejection from society, does not give them much hope. They generally have been living hand-to-mouth, often begging on the streets or resorting to prostitution. Their jobs at Heshima include cooking, cleaning, teacher assistant to the teachers, therapy assistant to the therapists, and many of them work as artisans at Dignity Designs, our jewelry, and textile company. We sell at our small shop on campus, which is visited by Kenya?s many tourists. 3) Provide clean water to the surrounding community from our borehole on campus, ?Water for Dignity?. Clean water in Kenya is very hard to find. Walking a mile or two to get water is very common. Water is life. In 2011, we raised money to put in a borehole (well) so that each day hundreds of people from the local village can come to get water from Heshima. This also provides a job for one of our moms. She dispenses the water daily to all the people from the village.