The Forgotten International - Africa

In the summer of 2008, The Forgotten International had the opportunity to partner with The Rotary Club of San Jose on an educational project in Uganda. That was our first entry to working in the African continent. Together our two organizations sponsored a fellowship for a Bay Area graduate student to teach at a rural school called ZOEC in a remote village. While teaching her students, Dianna also supervised the building of an additional classroom for the school with funds sent by the San Jose Rotary and TFI. You can read about Dianna's experience on our Fellowship Program. For a variety of reasons, we decided not to renew our relationship with ZOEC.

In 2010, TFI made a grant to Sahara Relief, a nonprofit founded by a Stanford medical doctor, Jeffrey Peterson, MD, with the goal of bringing basic healthcare to tribal communities in the Sahara Desert. However, over 2011, political events in Northern Africa created an unstable environment such that security issues continue to be a concern in this region. We will stay in touch with Dr. Peterson and Sahara Relief to see how we might be able to help with his work in the future.

We are committed to working in Africa and continue to seek out and develop projects in various regions. In January 2012, TFI staffer Laura Tomforde visited at least eight programs in and around Nairobi, Kenya, for the purposes of understanding the needs of the organizations working with the most vulnerable women and children. Over the course of her month-long visit, Laura helped fund three of these programs on behalf of TFI: The Nest Baby Orphanage and Children's Home, St. Vincent's Children of Kibera and Euphrasia Women's Centre. We will follow up with our newly adopted projects to see how we can best help them help others. Some will be best served with small grants while others could benefit from a volunteer through our Fellowship Program.

Additionally, we are communicating with a former TFI volunteer, Kate Scurria, who is presently a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Uganda. We are working with Kate on a project to purchase and install a large water tank that will provide the community where she lives and works with a clean, reliable water source. We are looking forward to the completion of this project, and we are happy to be working with Kate again, even from a great distance.

Photos from Uganda will be posted soon!

The Programs We Support - Africa

The Nest: Baby Orphanage

Limuru, Kenya
www.thenesthome.com

This Charitable Trust currently houses over 30 babies in their Baby Orphanage. Some of the children have been abandoned and some are referred to The Nest by the local police and hospitals throughout Nairobi. Many are children of imprisoned mothers, who are taken in for petty offenses leaving their babies with nowhere to go. The Nest works closely with the Children's Court and the Nairobi Prisons and is known as the best place to send these babies while the mothers carry out their sentences. Children are never turned away even if they are very sick and require extra care. The Nest also serves as a Halfway House for the mothers when they are released from prison and require counseling and support to help them find employment to begin to take care of their families again. The Nest offers needed care for vulnerable women and children and also provides employment for local Kenyan women. They rely on donations to do their work and to expand their facilities to be able to offer more needed services to this community. TFI first visited The Nest in 2012 and left an initial donation with them to serve their immediate needs and will continue to support this worthy project.

The Nest: Children's Home

Limuru, Kenya
www.thenesthome.com

The Children's Home also operated by The Nest is for children ranging between 2-17 yrs. old. They currently house and care for over 80 children, some who are committed into their care from the Children's Court because their mother are imprisoned and some who have been abandoned as babies and grow up in The Nest until they can find them another home. The children all receive care and education regardless of how long they will be at the home, for some it will only be a few months until they are reunited with their mothers, while others will spend years there. Many of the children arrive severely traumatized along with suffering from separation anxiety from their mothers. Social workers and caring staff help the children and they are also able to visit their mothers regularly in prison to maintain the family bond. The Children's Home receives a lot of volunteers to help with the everyday tasks, but is always in need of more help because the number of children is always increasing. They are in desperate need for sponsors for the children to help put them through school especially as they get older and outgrow the education they offer at the children's home. TFI first visited The Nest in 2012 and is proud to support them in all their work.

St. Vincent's Children of Kibera

Kibera, Kenya
www.kiberachildren.org

The school has informally been operating for over a decade, but became a registered NGO in 2004. They currently have 75 kids that attend the daycare school and feeding program. The school is not only a safe place for these children to receive care during the day where they otherwise would be on the streets while their parents work, but often times is the only place they are receiving meals. They are fed every morning and afternoon before they leave to go home. The school reaches out to the most underprivileged children in Kibera. The children also receive medical attention and treatment which often times expands into helping their family members as well. Beyond the Daycare School they have an operating Rescue Center where orphaned children are provided food, housing, and financial support for school. Many of the children attend boarding schools and mostly stay at the center during the 3 school holidays each year when they have nowhere to go. Other children go to local schools stay there full-time. Their biggest needs are sponsors for the children. Steep school fees make education prohibitive to very poor children. TFI fist visited St. Vincent's in 2012 and left a donation towards the school fees for 10 children.

Euphrasia Women's Centre

Nairobi, Kenya

The Center, run by the Good Shepherd Sisters, offers women a 2-year course where they learn a variety of vocational skills such as sewing, beadwork, card making, baking and cooking. The women also take educational courses and learn about their basic human rights. Along with this, the women receive counseling and help with job placement after they complete the program. They also run the Karibu Crisis Center which gives temporary shelter to women in immediate need. Most who come are pregnant and have been through traumatic experiences. They receive extended counseling and medical attention, along with help reconciling with families and referrals to other partner organizations. They also have an Income Generating Program which allows the women to sell items they have made through Euphrasia and earn a living until they are able to get a job elsewhere to provide for themselves. They don't have a website, so their current need is to hire a web developer to build a site for them. This would help them better disseminate information about their services as well as be used to market the goods the women are trying to sell and raise income. TFI left a donation for their immediate needs with plans to support their work in the future.

Sahara Relief

Sahara Desert Region, Africa
www.sahararelief.org

Sahara Relief is an international charitable organization committed to the delivery of essential healthcare to mothers and children in the Sahara desert region and Western Africa. There is a dire lack of basic healthcare services in the remote areas of Africa, especially relating to maternal and child healthcare. The implications of inadequate access to healthcare extend beyond the medical realm; poor health can negatively affect one's ability to attend school, earn a living, or interact in the community. Sahara Relief aims to work collaboratively with local tribes to establish healthcare clinics in the region, utilizing modern medical techniques and supplies, and provide ongoing training for the indigenous healthcare workers by American medical professionals. Their goal is to create a series of autonomously operating clinics for mothers and children that is both effective and sustainable. The Forgotten International supports their efforts with small grants to get their first clinic in Niger up and running.

Zinunula Omunaku Educational Center (ZOEC)

Kiryagonja, Uganda

The Zinunula Omunaku Educational Center is a remote village school that provides nursery care and a primary school for over 100 children in the surrounding community. Located in one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest countries in the world, all of these children and their families live on less than a dollar a day. At this school the students receive school uniforms, are taught classes in math, science, social studies and English and are given time to play. The construction of the school rooms, desks and the purchase of basic school supplies are all made possible through donations. Over the summer, our funds were used to pay for the services of a graduate school student from San Jose, California, who taught at the school for three months, as well as purchase a large number of text books and school supplies. This school and these children still have much work before them, but very much appreciated the help.

Four Program Areas

Grant Programs

Service

Goods and Supplies

Awareness