Outreach Africa ~Bringing Hope To Africa's Aids Orphans

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Hearth to Hearth Ministries is starting this Faces of Africa project to help raise money for African Orphans. We are putting images in the shape of Africa and including pictures in them to tell a story. For example the first image has pictures of the African orphans at the gate of Hope for Children Center Orphanage. Orphans come to the gate daily hoping to be let in so that they can get regular meals and an education. The second image has pictures of some happy African children. We are trying to inprove the life of orphaned and abandoned African children by making room for them in one of Hearth to Hearth Ministries' orphanages so that we can see more happy African children.

With this Faces of Africa project we are trying to raise money to build more orphanage buildings so that we can house and educate more of Africa's orphaned and abandoned children. Please click the Donate to help African Orphans link to make a donation to help Hearth to Hearth Ministries help more African Orphans. Please say that your donation is for the "Faces of Africa project" to build new orphanage buildings.

The images on this page were compiled by a teenage girl who wants to use her talents to help African Orphans. We are just starting this page and we will add images as we get them made. We are putting the code to insert these images on your website or social network profile above the images in italics and we encourage you to use them to help raise awareness of the plight of African Orphans.

Faces of Africa

African orphaned and abandoned children.



This image is from Faces of Africa

Faces of happy African children.

Sponsor an orphan through Hearth to Hearth Ministries. You can click on sponsor an orphan to learn more about sponsoring and orphan. You can also see more African orphans that need sponsors.

H-248 Evans
Born December 9, 1993
His parents died when he was very young. The father died in 1994 and the mother in 2000. After her death the relatives seized the property and sold it sending him away. He lived with a variety of sympathizers until finally he heard of our center. He came and asked for a job but was accepted as an orphan. He is good at math and likes to play football. He has been in the center since 2006.

If you would like to sponsor Evans please write to sponsorship@hearthtohearth.org

H-238 Everline
Born April 7, 1992
Everline was physically abused. She has been in the center since December, 2006. Everline is in grade level Form 1, and is very good in math. She likes playing volleyball, and eating beans and rice. I asked her if she was happy living at Hope Center, and she told me some of what she had gone through being forced into a marriage. She is very happy now and feels she has a family and a future. Everline would like to be a nurse. If you would like to sponsor Everline please write to sponsorship@hearthtohearth.org

We are trying to help as many of the world's orphans as possible, starting in Kenya and Uganda Africa, where we care for nearly 600 African orphans.

If you're not able to sponsor at this time but would like to give a gift to help our African orphans and orphanages. Please Donate to help African Orphans. Every dollar is a blessing.

This image is from Faces of Africa

Soulwork Africa: Hope for AIDS Orphans.

Systemic Coaching & Training in Africa

We introduced systemic coaching to Africa with SABC TV (South Africa Broadcasting Corporation). We provide assistance for volunteer workers who assist AIDS orphans in East Africa and for organizations who help young people have better relationships in Nigeria.

HIV and AIDS is devastating Africa. Enormous numbers of adults are living and dying with HIV/AIDS, with less access to health care than anywhere else in the world. There is little money and a large social stigma of being HIV positive or an AIDS orphan. Many children are without parents, money or skills.

Soulwork Nigeria

Systemic Coaching for Relief Workers
Martyn Carruthers

A happy partnership - intelligent children growing to independence - wise parents - supportive friends - a comfortable home - fulfilling work - a sense of being where you should be ... what could be better?

If only it were so easy. In Tanzania, some two million people are infected with HIV and will die of AIDS. And in Tanzania alone, there are already a million AIDS orphans. About half of all orphans are due to the deaths of their parents from AIDS. These young children desperately need help. They need financial support in a country that is very poor by Western standards ... and they need emotional support.

In many families, one or more adults are HIV positive or have already died of AIDS. And when a person dies "before their time" - there are often unpleasant emotional consequences for the children of the family ... and for their children.

Some of these children will die from malnutrition ... without food. Some will die from diseases such as diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and measles ... without treatment. Poverty and illiteracy are made worse by hunger. Abandoned and malnourished children start school later, if at all, and find learning more difficult. These orphans are more likely to die ... or to live with emotional scars than your children.

Under stress, both children and adults may lose access to their sense of identity. Following a premature death, other family members, usually young children, may suffer identity loss, and either lose any sense of self or unconsciously identify with a dead person.

The risk of identification with a dead person is much higher if the dead person is perceived to have died a shameful death (such as abortion or suicide) - and AIDS is seen as shameful. The symptoms of dead person identification are unpleasant.

Some Signs & Symptoms of Dead Person Identification

• Chronic sadness and melancholy


• May appear to have "psychic" sensitivity


• Preoccupied with death and dying


• Fascination with cemeteries

• May risk their lives (may welcome death)


• May be sterile or avoid becoming parents


• May fear that own children will die young


• May have miscarriages and dead babies

[ Identity Loss . Dead Person Identification . Parent Coaching ]

Another challenge in families with AIDS is survivor guilt. If a family member dies in a way that is perceived as unjust, surviving members may feel guilty that they are alive when a good person died. People who feel guilty can find ways to punish themselves.

Soulwork offers brief yet lasting solutions for relationship and emotional problems following premature adult deaths in families. These methods were developed during extensive post-abortion and post-suicide systemic coaching in Europe.

Coaches, counselors and workers who understand dead person identification can better recognize and help people with this condition. Empathy and consideration can flow with systemic solutions.

Soulwork training combines theory, demonstration and exercises to provide a complete system of individual, couple and family coaching. Live demonstrations will help you recognize, evaluate and change your emotions about people who have died - as a foundation for you helping families.

Although this workshop is to help relief workers recognize and dissolve the consequences of premature deaths in families affected by AIDS, the same principles can be used to alleviate the emotional consequences of other deaths in families.

This training includes many demonstrations and exercises to help participants test and apply Soulwork skills. Every point is discussed and demonstrated, and is followed by exercises. After each exercise, any interesting or challenging issues are discussed. Participants can learn very quickly this way.

As a knowledge about HIV and AIDS helps people work with people who are HIV-positive; this course includes training for people working, or wishing to work, with AIDS orphans and vulnerable children.

Systemic Coaching Objectives
At the end of the systemic coaching portion of this workshop, you will know how to:

• Recognize signs of Identification


• Discover with whom a person is identified


• Help people reclaim their own lost identity


• Resolve Dead Person Identification

Systemic Coach Training in Africa

Many of our trainings for relief workers in Africa are for our expenses only. Email us for more information about our participation in projects in Africa and elsewhere.

Systemic Coach Training

Systemic coaching helps people dissolve and control problems about relationships, health and success. We provide effective telephone coaching and training. We can train you to coach individuals, partners and teams to resolve emotional and relationship problems.Our systemic coach training is in 5-day segments (6-days if translation is required)

We donate systemic coaching expertise to help orphans and teenagers in Africa. Would you like to participate? Enhance your career with relationship coaching and systemic coach training. You can coach people to gain clarity and to dissolve success blocks and relationship issues. You can coach people to enjoy success and quality relationships. You can coach people to fulfill their dreams!

AfricaGuide.com

Photo: Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters ~
Guardian UK.

Surviving Child Trust Offers Hope to Africa's AIDS Orphans.

Hope to Africa's AIDS Orphans

By Linda Green

Each day in Africa, 9,500 people contract HIV/AIDS and another 6,500 die. A projected 2.5 million will die next year because the continent lacks the medicine to fight the virus. By 2010, Africa will have an estimated 25 million AIDS orphans - defined as children who have lost one or both of their parents to the pandemic.
Such grim statistics led Josiah Kandemiri, a 1999 graduate of United Methodist-related Africa University, to found Surviving Child Orphan Trust, a program that cares for AIDS orphans and helps them build a future. Kandemiri had been teaching at Murewa Primary School, which is inside the Murewa United Methodist Mission Center, about 56 miles outside Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. In January 2000, he attended an HIV/AIDS awareness workshop organized by the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe and the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries. That experience compelled him to take the initiative in caring for AIDS orphans.

As a first step, Kandemiri consulted with the leadership at the primary school about the situation. That led to the formation of a committee of community leaders as well as school and church officials to work on the issue. A survey identified 150 orphans between the ages of 6 and 13 in the school, many of them hungry and in tattered clothes. Some were abuse victims in need of counseling, some had no money left to pay their school fees. The children were living in different parts of the district, cared for by grandparents or someone else who had taken them in - or, in some cases, they fended for themselves.

In response, the Surviving Child Orphan Trust program was launched in August 2000, and today it is supported as an Advance Special of the United Methodist Church. Though based at the primary school, the trust includes the entire community in caring for the children.

"Our purpose is to work with orphans infected and affected by HIV/AIDS in schools and within the community," said Kandemiri, trust secretary. "The impact of the AIDS pandemic has made the lives of the people of our community, especially children, very miserable and hopeless.

"Our aim is to bring light to the school and its community and to assist orphans materially, physically, morally and spiritually. As teacher-volunteers, we work as caregivers, counselors and skills training officers (for) the pupils for their future sustainability."

Raising AIDS awareness is a critical need, and Kandemiri said one of Surviving Child's goals is to "educate the young girls that it is wrong for an elder to touch them." In parts of Zimbabwe, HIV/AIDS-infected men have been misled into believing they can be cured if they have intimate relations with a virgin. "I'm trying to help the girls realize that they can get (AIDS) too if they do this," Kandemiri said. Young orphans girls are often living in homes of male guardians where abuses occur. "Many of the girls feel that if they tell, they will have no place to stay or go. We have to break the barrier of protectiveness," he said.

Trust officials plan to open a hostel at the school in response to the rising number of sexually abused children, especially small girls. The trust wants a hostel to board the children during the school term so that they would have to go home only during holidays. "This way, we will reduce the number of cases of rape and child sexual abuse," Kandemiri said.

Surviving Child began with 250 students, and that number has continued to rise. "It is not easy to work with orphans or with any traumatized group of society, especially if one is not specially trained for such situations," Kandemiri said.

Six hundred orphans live in and around the Murewa United Methodist Mission Center. The trust's efforts are centered at the Murewa Primary School, which draws more than 1,200 students from throughout Zimbabwe.

Counseling sessions are held twice a week to help the children adapt to being orphans and develop HIV/AIDS awareness. The sessions are designed to empower the children and teach them skills for meeting basic needs.

"God is the source of inspiration (for the) serving and works of charity that we do at the trust and at the school," said the Rev. Elliot Chikwenjere, director of the area Council on Ministries and pastor in charge of the Murewa United Methodist Mission. "We found that the best way to serve the Lord is to be a friend to the marginalized."

The trust provides supplementary feeding in the form of one meal (lunch) per day to 260 students and is providing elementary health care for serious problems that require special practitioners. "We discovered that feeding the orphans was one way to keep them in school; otherwise they would be out in the woods scavenging for food," Chikwenjere said.

The trust also keeps some orphans in school from August through December by paying their school fees of about $900 and providing clothing. Caregivers attached to the trust also assist the children.

Beauty Mutonhi is one such caregiver. "I volunteer to work with the children because they need help. All 600 of the orphans are my children. As a mother, a teacher, a Christian, I put these children in my heart, and I help when needed."

The trust draws much of its financial and material support from First United Methodist Church in Walton, Indiana; Crofton (Md.) United Methodist Church; and Transport Aids-Wheels for Africa, a charitable organization based in Nagoya, Japan. The money helps keep the children in school and provides warm winter clothes, food and medical care.

"But more donations are needed," Kandemiri said. "If we don't get any donated food and other necessities, things are going to get bad." The trust needs children's clothes, shoes and blankets.

Surviving Child officials have identified initiatives to make the trust self-sustaining and to provide the children with opportunities to earn money. Long-term programs include:

• The Orchard Project. The orchard is expected to begin bearing fruit, including mangos, apples, oranges and bananas, in five to 10 years. Meanwhile, the students at the primary school are learning how to care for the trees.


• The Sewing Project. Boys and girls are taught sewing and other skills to help maintain their clothes.


• The Feeding Project. Many students do not get enough food at home, so the school provides a food break each day at 10 a.m.

The trust also is teaching the students survival skills through three projects focusing on gardening, raising poultry and growing mushrooms. Each projects teaches selling skills.

Besides Surviving Child, the United Methodist Church's Murewa District has two other orphan trusts. A third, the Uzumba Orphan Trust, is no longer under the auspices of the district because of accountability issues, Chikwenjere said.

"Without basic education, the lives of these children are doomed," Kandemiri said. "I hope and pray that my dream will one day be a reality and that these children we nurture will grow into leaders of our nation and continent."

Shortly after meeting with a United Methodist News Service writer and photographer in early November, Kandemiri was injured in an automobile accident. He died Nov. 18.

"I've received a lot in my life," he told UMNS. "What I've done is my way of saying 'thank you.' It is my conviction and my faith that I have to make a change in the lives of these children so that they may have a future."

Photos: 1. Women from the village maintain a vigil over the body of Linda Sinoya's mother, which lies beneath a burial shroud at her home near Dandara Township, Zimbabwe. Ten-year-old Linda joins thousands of children who are left orphaned every day by AIDS. 2. Josiah Kandemiri, a 1999 graduate of Africa University, walks the grounds of the Murewa United Methodist Mission Center in Murewa, Zimbabwe. Kandemiri helped found the Surviving Child Orphan Trust, which cares for about 600 children left orphaned by AIDS. Kandemiri died Nov. 18 from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. UMNS photos by Mike DuBose. Click on any photo to see a larger version.
How to Participate in This Program
People can help make a difference by giving to the AIDS Orphan Trust, Advance #982842-6, or UMCOR's Global HIV/AIDS Program Development, Advance #982345-7. Give through a local United Methodist church or send financial contributions to: UMCOR, 475 Riverside Dr., Room 330, New York, NY 10115. Call

African Orphans.

There are millions of orphaned children worldwide due to wars, natural disasters, AIDS, marlaria and other diseases.

Less than 1% of foreign orphans will ever be adopted

Traumatized, these orphans are left to roam alone. Will you do something to help them?

Give Now

Pray For An Orphan

Take A Mission Trip

Become a Sponsor

AFRICA: A Continent of Orphans - IPS ipsnews.net.

War, AIDS, malaria, cholera and famine have gradually turned Africa into a continent full of orphaned children and teenagers.

According to the latest statistics released by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), there are 48.3 million orphans south of the Sahara desert, one-quarter of whom have lost their parents to AIDS.



Severely malnourished children are cared for at the Keita feeding centre.
Photo: WFP/Marcus Prior



Photo: Francis Temman/AP

References Also : AIDS Orphans.
Emotional impact

The links below are to Power Point slide shows about Orphans and Orphanages. You need to have high speed internet access and use Internet Explorer to be able to view these properly. When you click one of the links below a new window will open and it will take up to a couple of minutes for the slide show to start.

Logan in Kenya With the Orphans (4 MB Power Point slideshow)

Logan, age 18, was not prepared for the poverty that the street orphans lived in. This slide show is made up of some of the pictures that he took and some letters that he wrote back to the USA about the orphans coming to the gate of the orphanages begging to be let in. The song used is "I CRY" by Messianic Garden. (We have not been able to find out who we are suppose to ask permission to use this song. If anyone knows how to find out please let us know.)

Glory Children's Center Orphanage and Orphans (8 MB Power Point slideshow)

Glory Children's Center is an Orphanage that is home to over 130 orphans. This slide show uses the song "Held" by Natalie Grant. (The song has been dissable until we can get written permission to use it.)

Hope for Children Center Orphanage and Orphans (3 MB Power Point slideshow)

Hope for Children Center Orphanage is home to over 230 orphans. Song "Is There a Heaven for Me" by Ray Boltz. (The song has been disabled until we can get written permission to use it.)

Africa (28 MB Power Point slideshow)

Pictures of Africa to music by Ryan Walt, Geestelik Panfluit Treffers.

Thank You for Caring about the Orphans (2 MB Power Point slideshow)

A slide show thanking Hearth to Hearth Ministries' sponsors and donors. The song is "Fill the World with Love" by Wintley Phipps.

Hearth to Hearth Ministries' History (7 MB Power Point slideshow)

Slide show of Hearth to Hearth Ministries' History with music by Ryan Walt, Geestelik Panfluit Treffers.

Hearth to Hearth Ministries' History (4 MB Power Point slideshow alternate version)

Another slide show of Hearth to Hearth Ministries' history with music by Ryan Walt, Geestelik Panfluit Treffers.

Tell me about Orphans (4 MB Power Point slideshow)

Slide show about African orphans. This highlights the life of an orphan with music by Ryan Walt, Geestelik Panfluit Treffers.




Orphans and Orphanages is working to help as many of the worlds orphans as possible. We have started a website for orphanages at http://www.orphanages.ws

Orphan Extra newsletter

Does Anybody Care?

Volunteer at an orphanage

Blog about your favorite orphanage

Sponsor an African orphan

Helping Orphans and Orphanages

Extreme Poverty and World Hunger.

AIDS Orphans.

Emotional impact
Children whose parents are living with HIV often experience many negative changes in their lives and can start to suffer neglect, including emotional neglect, long before they are orphaned. Eventually, they suffer the death of their parent(s) and the emotional trauma that results. They may then have to adjust to a new situation, with little or no support, and may suffer exploitation and abuse.

In one study carried out in rural Uganda, high levels of psychological distress were found in children who had been orphaned by AIDS. Anxiety, depression and anger were more found to be more common among AIDS orphans than other children. 12% of AIDS orphans affirmed that they wished they were dead, compared to 3% of other children interviewed.

These psychological problems can become more severe if a child is forced to separate from their siblings upon becoming orphaned. In some regions this occurs regularly: a survey in Zambia showed that 56% of orphaned children no longer lived with all of their siblings.

Household impact
A member of the community takes care of children orphaned by AIDS,

Lesotho.
The loss of a parent to AIDS can have serious consequences for a child's access to basic necessities such as shelter, food, clothing, health and education. Orphans are more likely than non-orphans to live in large, female-headed households where more people are dependent on fewer income earners. This lack of income puts extra pressure on AIDS orphans to contribute financially to the household, in some cases driving them to the streets to work, beg or seek food.

The majority of children who have lost a parent continue to live in the care of a surviving parent or family member, but often have to take on the responsibility of doing the housework, looking after siblings and caring for ill or dying parent(s). Children who have lost one parent to AIDS are often at risk of losing the other parent as well, since HIV may have been transmitted between the couple through sex.

Education
Children orphaned by AIDS may miss out on school enrolment, have their schooling interrupted or perform poorly in school as a result of their situation. Expenses such as school fees and school uniforms present major barriers, since many orphans' caregivers cannot afford these costs.15 Extended families sometimes see school fees as a major factor in deciding not to take on additional children orphaned by AIDS.16

AIDS orphans may also leave school to attend to ill family members, work or to look after young siblings. Even before the death of a parent, children may miss out on educational opportunities; research in Kenya suggests that children of HIV-positive parents are significantly less likely to attend school than other children.

Outside of school, AIDS orphans may also miss out on valuable life-skills and practical knowledge that would have been passed on to them by their parents. Without this knowledge and a basic school education, children may be more likely to face social, economic and health problems as they grow up.

Stigmatisation
Children grieving for dying or dead parents are often stigmatised by society through association with AIDS. The distress and social isolation experienced by these children, both before and after the death of their parent(s), is strongly exacerbated by the shame, fear, and rejection that often surrounds people affected by HIV and AIDS. Because of this stigma, children may be denied access to schooling and health care. Once a parent dies children may also be denied their inheritance and property. Often children who have lost their parents to AIDS are assumed to be HIV positive themselves, adding to the likelihood that they will face discrimination and damaging their future prospects. In this situation children may also be denied access to healthcare that they need. Sometimes this occurs because it is assumed that they are infected with HIV and their illnesses are untreatable.

"We should remember that the process of losing parents to HIV/AIDS for the children often includes the pain and the shame of the stigma and the fear that the disease carries in most our societies." UNICEF representative Bjorn Ljunqvist

Family structures
In African countries that have already suffered long, severe epidemics, AIDS is generating orphans so quickly that family structures can no longer cope. Traditional safety nets are unravelling as increasing numbers of adults die from HIV-related illnesses. Families and communities can barely fend for themselves, let alone take care of orphans. Typically, half of all people with HIV become infected before they are aged 25, developing AIDS and dying by the time they are 35, leaving behind a generation of children to be raised by their grandparents, other adult relatives or left on their own in child-headed households.

The demand for care and support is simply overwhelming in many areas. HIV reduces the caring capacity of families and communities by deepening poverty, through medical and funeral costs as well as the loss of labour.