Home of Hope Foundation

Newsletter 2-2022

DEAR FRIENDS

Greetings from Lusaka, and welcome to Home of Hope’s second newsletter!

As a reminder for those of you who are just getting to know, Home of Hope gives traumatized and abused children in Zambia a pathway off the streets. We offer each child a safe home, loving care, and therapeutic intervention in the short term, together with the chance to re-integrate with their families and continue their education over the longer term. We do our best to meet street children where they are and to love them exactly as they are.

So much has happened at Home of Hope over the past six months, and we are eager to share some of these stories with you. But before we do, we want to start with gratitude to Home of Hope’s beautiful extended family, of which each of you is a part. This year, your generosity has kept hungry bellies full, sent children off to school in the morning, kept them warm at night, and transported them to remote rural areas to restore their relationships with family. Several of you have spent time with the children in our care, played games with them, delighted in them, and been their teachers and steadfast champions. We are grateful for you and the many ways you have loved and cared for the children in this community over the course of 2022.

And now, let us catch you up on some of our goings on …

THE STORY OF ALFRED

This year, as of the first week of November, we have welcomed 97 children to Home of Hope – utterly maxing out our modest facility and exceeding our annual record, with two months left to go in the year. We have also managed to reunite 68 children with their families safely.

We want to tell you about one especially joyful reunion.

A year and a half ago, a frantic mother came to our door looking for her missing nine-year-old son. The boy was new to Lusaka – he had arrived in the big city from his tiny village (300 km away) only a few days before. On his second day there, he had headed out to play with a group of other children, become hopelessly lost in the twists and turns of the compound, and had not returned.

His mother searched for him, moving from orphanage to orphanage, desperate to find her child. But with no national system in place to track and search for missing children in Zambia, her task was daunting.

Although the child, Alfred, was not among the children in our care, we meticulously recorded his name, age, description, and

the timeframe and circumstances of his disappearance in our database.

Months passed. Day after day, the mother kept up the search but could not find her child. Her extended family accused her of selling her son and disowned her. The family was utterly broken.

Months later, child welfare called Home of Hope and asked us to take in a boy named Fred, a nine-year-old who had run away, again and again, from other facilities. We were told that Fred had been on and off the streets since the age of two. But when we reviewed our records, we noticed that his name was similar to the one the mother had given us all those months ago, “Alfred,” his age was a match, and he spoke Tonga, the language of the province where Alfred was from. We wondered: Could this be the same child?

We called the number the mother had left for us. As she described her child to us in greater detail – light brown skin, gap-toothed grin, ears prone to infection – we felt increasingly confident. This was the one.

Alfred’s mother arrived by taxi within half an hour of our call. She laid eyes on her child, swept him up in her arms, and gathered his long legs into her lap. The boy laid his head on his mother’s chest. The two of them wept with joy, and we cried right along with them.

THE MINISTER KNOWS ABOUT US

Not long after that joyful reunion, we received an unexpected, urgent phone call from Zambia’s Permanent Secretary for Social Services.

It was the second half of President Hichilema’s first year in office, and he was troubled by seeing so many street children on the streets of Lusaka, day after day. He called the Permanent Secretary into his office, looked her in the eye, and told her in no uncertain terms: the time had arrived to fix the problem, and he expected it done by November 2022. Suddenly under tremendous pressure and rattled by the impending deadline, the Permanent Secretary made inquiries into who in Zambia could provide a “fresh take “on the “old problem”. She quickly found her way to Home of Hope.

Since that first phone call from the Permanent Secretary, we have formed remarkable connections with her and other government leaders who are not only under pressure but also genuinely motivated to learn about child development and find lasting solutions for traumatized street children. We find ourselves training government leaders in trauma-informed care, testifying at the Parliamentary Committee meetings, and collaborating with the government to reimagine and renovate a long-vacant government children’s facility. What had historically been little more than detention for kids, hopefully will soon feature small, self-contained, family-scale homes headed by house parents trained in the “Home of Hope” way. Keeping careful records will become the national norm. It won’t be fast, it won’t be easy, and success is far from guaranteed. But in partnership with the government, we are laying the groundwork for a system that safeguards vulnerable children.

SYSTEM CHANGE IS GRATIFYING...

…but back at home, we find ourselves with more children than ever, and just meeting their basic needs can be a struggle. We run exceedingly lean, are faithful stewards of every contribution, and have recently brought on new, volunteer expertise to improve the quality of our financial management. But while we are closer to meeting our budget this year than in years past, a roughly $10,000 gap remains.

Of particular concern, over and above our minimum operating budget, we are at risk of losing one of the most basic tools to do our work: a reliable vehicle to reach families in remote areas. Right now, month after month, funds that are urgently needed elsewhere are leaching out of our bank account to cover costly repairs to our ailing 12-year-old truck. We have matching funds in place to purchase a new vehicle, but need donations of $12,000 to release them.

To those of you who have already pledged or contributed to our work this year, we can’t thank you enough. For those in a position to contribute to basic needs or to our vehicle fund now, we ask for your continued partnership in this work.

In closing, we will share with you one of our favorite African proverbs:

When you pray, move your feet.

Thank you, friends, for moving your feet with us this year