What our children say
(click image to view)
Children’s Hopes and Fears.
Children's Hopes and Fears
Despite the best efforts of our staff in Kenya, the traumas the children have experienced take a long time to heal.
In an exercise with the children we invited them to write or draw their hopes on one side of a piece of paper and their fears on the other. Their responses were revealing and upsetting: many of them refer to their former lives by fearing being dishonest, or hungry or ill. They also fear violence and anger, HIV and the dreaded hospitalisation which took away so many of their parents permanently. More than one of the girls referred to her time on the streets as madness: “I did not like to be mad girl”, says Francesca Kathambi, and another echoed this, writing that she feared “to be mad”.
Their hopes
Their hopes are equally reflective of their rescue. Apart from the normal aspirations to various occupations that children have, ranging from doctors and pilots to tv broadcasters and judges, they appear to be very sensitive to injustice and genuinely keen to make a difference themselves.
Here are a few quotations (notice how good their English is, after just these few years in school):
