Count your Blessings

I am now working with an organization called “the Child is Innocent” it has been set up to help sponsor kids for school. The only education that is provided by the state is primary school. Then the students and their families have to come up with a way to pay for secondary school (junior high). As a member of the interview panel, we assess the children for need and aptitude for what we would call high school. I sat through some incredible stories. Girls that had lost both parents, girls that had to commute from their villages into the city at night so they would not be abducted or murdered by the rebels. Girls with fathers that had died from HIV, leaving them to be cared for by infected and now sick mothers. Girls that had sisters that had been married off at ages as young as twelve. The kids that still had their parents one or both were peasant farmers, which means they dig holes to extract rocks in order to sell the gravel. Although none of them said so their stories left you to fill in the blanks of numerous sexual abuses. Hopefully “the Child is Innocent” will be able to provide a happier ending. The founder of the organization was also a kid that had a similar story to the above mentioned. He was a recipient of much needed support and is now a doctor and has his masters from the London school of economics. He is a wonderful human being and I am so honored to have this opportunity to be working with him and all the others that are a part of this program.