Happy Life Children's Home

Nora writing
Our stay here in Kenya is divided into two parts. The first three months we are living in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, at the FOCUS centre. We will be working with children of different ages with regular school and Sunday-school. The last three months we will be separated and sent to three different universities in Kenya. There we will be working with a volunteer who has responsibility of several christian unions in the area. (Explaining what this means later)

This is a short video, showing how we got to work, and also where we spent most of our time.(the rooftop is where we ate lunch)

Actually, we had our last day today, but for the past month we have been working at a home for abandoned children called Happy Life Children´s Home. We haven't started working with children in school yet, because the children have been working with exams and had vacation. 

So instead of doing nothing, we worked at Happy Life. The home started in 2002, and is well established today. They often get kids straight from the hospital, because the mother doesn't want the child or just leaves without it. There are also incidents where a mother asks a person on the street to look out for the child for a couple of minutes and then never returns. The person then goes to the police with the child and from there they come to Happy Life.

At Happy Life, they have a room for the children from 0-6 months, the ones from 6 months to 6 months-1 year and a room for the toddlers from 1-3 years. The older children live in another complex a couple of hous from Happy Life, where they also go to school.

The home has one or two employees for each room and some for administration, but otherwise they get a lot of help from volunteers. The volunteers are either from universities, helping organizations or people who come by their own initiative. The children have a lot of sad backgrounds, but fortunately we were told that around half the kids get adopted from the home.  

We usually stay in the room for the infants, from 0-6 months. We help with feeding the babies, bathing them and changing their diapers.