Elizabeth House

June 17th, 2008 by ehamsher

It’s a pleasant afternoon here in Mukono today, despite the constant smoke from the burning garbage. Gen and I had both of our P-2 and P-3 classes today, so it was a busy morning. We tried to work on interviewing by having the kids draw a picture of the person sitting next to them and asking them four fairly simple questions. We haven’t gone through them all yet, but I think we got a lot of pictures, not a lot of faces, and few answers. You take what you can get. Atleast they’re drawing and using some creativity. I would really like them to work on their interview/public speaking skills though. Some struggle with English, but most of them just speak very quietly, a skill I would really like to work on. On a side note from my own classes however, I wanted to use this post to talk about Elizabeth House, the center that I visited yesterday on my day off.
Elizabeth House is a center for children with disabilities. It has been started and primarily funded by a middle-aged couple from Britain, who moved here ten years ago and got started on the project. I don’t know the details of funding or anything like that, but I do know they have taken a great deal of money out of their own pockets to put this center in to action. Elizabeth House is Tama’s assigned center. He is a med student, and is extremely interested in working with both physically and mentally disabled children. I want to emphasize that this center is not a school. It just got up and formally running very recently, but it is a home for children with a variety of disabilities and touching individual stories. They run a variety of activities during the day, and they take day boarders as well, but for the most part it offers a home to disabled children who have either been orphaned, or abandoned in some other way. Many of them were left alone in a house by themselves all day long, stuck on a couch or a mat while their parents were at work. In African culture, having a child with a disability can almost be seen as a curse, and an embarassment. Parents use children as an insurance plan, hoping that one day when they are too old to work their children will help them financially however they can. In this sense, the children at Elizabeth House are useless, and many are resented. Tama has said many great things about the center, he spent the last few weeks painting and getting things together for it to open up and move kids in, so I wanted to go check it out for myself. The kids all have a variety of disabilities, many of them are only assumed disabilities because they have never been formally diagnosed. Disabilities range from simple mental retardation to malaria-induced palsy to cerebral palsy, as well as a range of others.
The children were absolutely amazing. I spent the day playing with them, just getting down on the ground and building blocks or holding the paper still while they marked on it with crayon. I really found the kids to be heart-warming, and a true inspiration. Many of them have seen and experienced things that I will never begin to understand. They just want cuddled and played with. They thrived on my attention, because they were so used to being ignored before they came to Elizabeth House. Valerie and David, the British couple who started to program were there for a few hours overseeing the new staff and the facilities, and I got to talk to them about the children. They had a story of how they found every single one of the children who were there, some of which were absolutely heart-breaking. If you’re ever up for an absolutely gut-sickening, depressing conversation I can tell you about some of the children when I get back to the states. They showed me around the facilities, including the rooms where the children were staying. Everything is new, and as handicap accessible as they could get. Some of the kids are forced to use make-shift wheel chairs from some bolts, a couple of bike wheels, and a white plastic lawn chair. They don’t care. The rooms are painted bright colors, with cartoon and flowered curtains adorning the windows. I really have high hopes for the program, and I know Tama has already put his heart and soul in to it, planning individual physical therapy regimes for the kids who require it. If anyone is ever looking for a great charity to contribute to I strongly recommend Elizabeth House, which I can get anyone the information for.
Yesterday was an amazing day, I got some great pictures of some beautiful kids, and I really felt inspired. A lot of people say that Africa needs so much help and improvement that the little things don’t make a difference, but I strongly disagree. It is the programs like Elizabeth House, and people like Valerie and David that make a huge impact in the lives of kids who would have known nothing but the insides of their homes for the rest of their lives. Because of the program they will form a family with the other kids there, and hopefully learn basic skills they need to get on in life.
On that note, I wish everyone an amazing day. Peace, Love.