Our Father’s House unites homeless children with good homes. Since starting in 2013, we have met many young men and women sleeping in flour sacks under roof overhangs, being groomed to steal by unscrupulous scrap metal merchants.
We’ve asked ourselves over and over again about the best way to get these children placed in a loving home. But pretty early on, we started asking another question,
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could identify fragile homes and fix the problem before it fell apart and the kids went to the streets?”
Once the children are on the streets for three weeks, it becomes significantly more difficult to help them. They quickly get used to the hard life, and many find theft easier than school and chores (as long as they can avoid jail; children and adults go to the same jail in Tanzania).
We haven’t had much luck with identifying fragile homes before they fell apart, but the recent case of Irisi and Nuhu has given us hope.
Their father was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2016, and their mother couldn’t support them alone. Within a few months, she decided to leave them behind and start over in the big city of Mwanza. She left them behind with their grandmother. Of course, if the mother couldn’t support them alone, she knew things wouldn’t be any better with their grandmother. She just didn’t know what else to do.
The grandmother is doing her best, but the last three years have been rough. The hunger continued to gnaw them, and with everything locking down in April, things were only going to get worse. She didn’t see how they were going to make it, so she took the drastic step of going to visit her extended family to ask for help. She could only afford one bus ticket, so she left the children alone.
It wouldn’t have taken long for the scrap metal merchants to notice Irisi and Nuhu, and then Moses and the Our Father’s House volunteers would have had their work cut out for them as they tried to help them unlearn the bad habits.
But Bibi Mwita noticed them first.
Several years ago, Bibi Mwita adopted one young man who had been living on the streets; she still cares for him to this day. She is one of few people in Tarime who are sensitive to the plight of homeless children, and when she saw two children walking the streets looking for food and things to sell, she knew something was wrong.
She asked Irisi and Nuhu where they were going, and when no answer was forthcoming, she invited them to stay with her. As a member of Tarime Methodist Church, she quickly introduced them to Moses and the Our Father’s House volunteers and asked what Our Father’s House should do to help.
As they earned the children’s trust and the story came out, bit by bit, Our Father’s House decided to support Bibi Mwita as she cared for them until their grandmother returned. When she returned, Our Father’s House donated some food and helped with school uniforms and registration so that Irisi and Nuhu could return to school.
And to help her for the long-term, Tarime Methodist Church is training and mentoring her in starting a tiny business.
We’re thankful we found Irisi and Nuhu before they had to start living on the streets. We’re thankful to have been the ounce of prevention in this case. And we want to learn from this, so that we can do more of this is the future.
Thank you, friends, for helping this story to turn out so much better than it could have. You can make more of this happen at https://advance.umcmission.org/p-1816-our-fathers-house.aspx
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