HUNGRY CHILDREN NEED YOUR HELP
HELPING HAND APPEAL 2017
For 12-year-old Moses, the choice is a stark one and ultimately it could be the difference between life and death.
He can spend his days wandering the streets, searching for scrap metal, or discarded materials such as paper and plastic, in a bid to provide a meagre living for his family; or he can go to school, receive an education and fight starvation by eating the nutritious food supplied by charity Mary’s Meals.
Moses’s situation is by no means unusual.
In Kenya, poverty is rife and children often fall through the gaps, where they are expected to grow up and start earning from a very young age.
For this year’s Helping Hand Appeal, we are once again teaming up with school feeding charity Mary’s Meals – this time to raise money for impoverished children, like those living in Kenya, who live in conditions of incredible hardship.
Mary’s Meals’ ethos is simple. Not only does the charity serve food packed with healthy ingredients, but also the incentive to gain an education that will hopefully lift the young people out of the cycle of deprivation.
Working in some of the poorest countries in the world, the charity uses local volunteers to cook nutritious food which is prepared and served in local schools.
To receive the food, children must attend classes, so attainment levels have risen dramatically in the places where Mary’s Meals works.
It is a clever and effective approach – and as it costs the equivalent of £13.90 to feed a child for a year, your generous donations will make a real difference to many young people who may not get any food other than that supplied by Mary’s Meals.
For Moses, the impact of Mary’s Meals has been huge. He lives in one room with his mother and three younger siblings in a one-storey terraced property made of mud, in the Karasani slums of Eldoret. It’s basic and austere, but even this is better than where he was little over a year before.
At the age of 10, Moses spent a year living on the streets, where his only means was scavenging. Hunger was common and in the darkest days he resorted to sniffing glue to stave off the hunger pangs.
A truly desperate situation, Moses would spend his days searching dumpsters for scrap, and if he couldn’t buy any food, he would sniff glue before finding any kind of shelter where he could sleep.
“I had to feel high to survive. It also stopped me feeling hungry.
“It gave me the illusion my belly was full. It stopped me feeling cold,” he said.
It was only the intervention of Moses’ headteacher, Scholastica Mashinga, who tracked the boy down and persuaded him to go back to school, that stopped the situation from getting even worse.
Thanks to her dedication, Moses was able to return to education and receive a
welcome meal of maize [porridge] or rice served with beans from Mary’s Meals. She said, “He was coming here [to Kapkenduiywo Primary School] but he was absent for a whole year.
“He works hard. When I tried to find out where he was, I learned he had followed his brother and was selling scraps, so I looked for him.
“I sent some of his classmates to find him and speak to him. When I sent for him, thank God he came. We brought him back to class and he has never left school since then.
“He’s a good student, and we are trying to help him in school. He can be an example to his brothers and sisters, but it’s hard for that family because where they live is pathetic. I hope Moses can get a better life.”
“APART FROM MARY’S MEALS, I DON’T ALWAYS HAVE SOMETHING TO EAT”
Moses is just one of many pupils who is now benefiting from the feeding project which, Scholastica says, is having a real impact in the school.
“We thank Mary’s Meals for giving the food. It’s making our enrolment go up. We had about 400 students, but now it’s up to 700.
“When the children are in school, the parents can go and look for casual jobs and get something to provide for the children,” she added.
Since he returned to school, life may have become easier for Moses in that he is back home and away from the immediate dangers of a life on the street.
However, things are still difficult. Money is scarce, which means food is hard to come by.
Often the Mary’s Meals porridge is all he will receive to eat in a day.
He said, “Apart from Mary’s Meals, I don’t always have something to eat. It’s a 50/50 chance.
“On Saturday and Sunday, sometimes there is nothing to eat.
“From Monday to Friday, for breakfast I usually have strong tea with sugar if we have it, but usually not.”
Despite the hardship Moses and his family face, returning to school has given Moses a sense of community – and ambition.
Nourished by the Mary’s Meals food, he has started to regain a sense of hope for the future.
“One of the things that made me come back off the streets was my headteacher said there would be food. That helped to bring me back.
“To me it feels like a lot, so I can sit in school and go the whole day.
“In the future, I would like to be a doctor. I like science and maths. I want to be a doctor, so that I can help the people round here.
“There are so many people here who feel sick and they don’t have good doctors to help them. I would like to do that.
“There’s an old man called Ndongo who lives near me and he’s very sick. He has no family and he lives alone. I would become a doctor to help him and people like him.”
Given his background, it is unsurprising that Moses hopes that others won’t suffer in the same way that he has.
He’s also aware of how important it is that he doesn’t fall back into old habits himself, so he avoids the people he used to go around with when he lived on the streets – even the old friends he would play with in the rare, lighter moments when they weren’t fighting for survival.
“They would try to get me back on the streets, but I wouldn’t agree because I am enjoying education,” Moses continued.
“Getting education opens new avenues – going to secondary school, university and getting a good job and helping my mother.
“Most of the children here are coming from very difficult backgrounds. I wish that sometime their lives would change.
“If they get education, they will help themselves and get better standards for their families.”
With your help and your kind donations, more children like Moses can look to the future with a greater sense of optimism.