When the riots were going on downtown a couple of weeks ago, Jessie saw a group of young street children running away from police officers that were after them (police officers were after all “thugs” and this pretty much always includes street children). They were on the other side of a canal but were about to run away from her and the police, she needed to get to them so that the police would leave them alone and so that she could bring them into the house so they could be safe. She didn’t have time to go around to the bridge and so she had to jump the canal to get to them in time. She ended up falling into a canal ferrying sewage, not clean water, and hit her head and hip in the process. However, she was able to get up, rescue them and bring them up to the house. (And yes, Jessie is my hero.)
One of those street boys was a young man named Ibra and that was how he was introduced to us and our programs in Kivulu. Ibra has the most beautiful smile in the whole world. He is the type of boy who steals your heart without having any idea of what he is doing. He loves to laugh and play and learn. He is certainly the cutest little soccer player I have ever seen, especially when he is trying so hard to pass me the ball that he keeps giving it to the other team and taking it so seriously the whole time. He knows how to stick up for himself and fight for his place in the harsh little world that he is living in, and yet he still retains a constant softness and sweet spirit.
He brightens up my day every time that I see him.
We have one more spot still open in our house, just one. After that spot is filled, because we are going to need to first find sponsors for the many kids that we already care for, it is going to be a long time before we are able to put any more street children into boarding school or into our home. The rest are going to have to wait a very long time.
Ibra is one of three boys that we are praying hard about to see if he is the one boy that God wants in our home.
It is a bit complicated but it is possible that we may be able to resettle Ibra back with his family. We are going tomorrow to try and find his mother and see.
I am absolutely dreading tomorrow.
I hate resettling street children with their families. It is always interesting and helps me learn a lot about my street kids and where they are coming from, but just about always, it breaks my heart.
The last boy that I resettled was a boy named Haluna Galoba. He had said he had run away from home because he was being mistreated by a step-mother but that he had heard that she had moved away and so he wanted to go back home. It was not an ideal situation, but if a street child asks to go home and they say that it is safe and possible, we always try our best to make it happen.
Last week, Collins, an uncle we work with and I took him on the 2.5 hours bus ride to Jinja, walked all over the town there trying to help him remember the correct direction and then finally took public motorcycles (bodabodas) to a small little slum on the edge of the Nile. We got lunch in a little room with no ventilation and then went on a small canoe/row boat type thing across the Nile to where his village was. We walked a while across the island and as we were nearing his home I decided to ask him how he was feeling about coming back home.
His response,
“I am afraid, they are going to beat me with sticks…”
His home was exactly as I expected it to be, a small hut in a little village overlooking the water with his young siblings and family all over the place. It was a very poor village and of the many people that were around, only two men had shoes on with everyone in old and tattered clothing. His family was very excited to see a white person but didn’t care very much that their son had come home. From the start his grandmother not only asked me if we could take Haluna back with us but if we could take some of his younger step-siblings as well. She told me, “I heard that white people love babies, here take this baby, her name is Babirye too like you. I am too old to take care of her, take her…” Haluna’s step mother was so busy nursing, playing with, and giving attention to her own small baby that she didn’t even look at him the whole time. I didn’t like staying in that village for the short time that I was there, everyone was asking me for things or arguing over items that Haluna had brought that we had bought him.
Two of his neighbors pulled Collins aside and asked if they could talk. They said they were concerned for the boy and told him Haluna’s situation. It matched completely with other thins that he had told us and with how everyone was acting now that we had brought him home.
Haluna’s mother had died when he was a young baby and he has no memory of her. She was the only person that ever loved him. His father is polygamous, Haluna has two step-mothers that hate him because he is the son of another wife. The only children they love are their own. Both women beat him constantly and would often deny him food. He spent a couple of months sleeping in the bush because they wouldn’t let him sleep at home. The step-mother that had hated and mistreated him the most had not moved away as he had thought.
The village also thinks that his step mom put a curse on his father so that he would not love him either. The father is away on business often but when he is home he often gets drunk and beats him. When Haluna ran away the father never told anyone or talked about it. He never went to look for him or ask around to see if anyone knew anything. He didn’t care.
In his entire life, Haluna has never had someone love him. He has never known love. The entire trip he asked everyone he saw if they knew his dad, if they had seen him, if they knew how he was doing. He was dying to see his father, he was dying to hear that he was missed, that he was loved. He was dying for the approval from a dad that beat him, that let his other wives mistreat him. A dad that went into town often but who had never bothered to spend an afternoon looking for him when he was living on the streets. And yet that was all that Haluna wanted. I believe that the only reason that Haluna went home was because he was hoping deep down that his dad would have woken up to the son he had had all along and accepted him home for the first time with open arms. I know that Haluna was a Christian because we had talked about it several times and how much God cared for him but the idea of God as a loving, caring father-figure was just hard for him to understand.
It is true that we didn’t know completely what Haluna’s situation was before taking him home but we knew it wasn’t ideal, it never is.
I know that Haluna was living a terrible life on the street but at least there he had a chance of someone finding him. He had a chance of someone finding him who might love him although as Jessie reminded me, he would experience a lot more abuse and trauma on the streets before that would happen IF it ever did. On the streets at least he would have had a chance of going into a home or of someone putting him through school.
There is no CPS in Uganda. There is no government that cares what happens to him. As Collins and I sat down in the little minibus leaving the village it was so hard leaving him and knowing that Haluna was still going to still be beaten, denied food, and cut down in every way. We all know that there is no future for him in his village. He is not going to go to school or grow up and have a chance at getting a decent job. He will be just like all of the beaten down men that were wandering around the village.
I feel so terrible about being the person that brought him back. Collins and I were the ones who brought him “home” and left him in that terrible place.
And I am dreading that for Ibra. I am dreading it so much.
You really ought to meet Ibra. He is the most beautiful and sweet boy in the whole world. He deserves the world. It just hardly ever works out like it should. It hardly ever works out that we resettle a street child home with their families and their family is actually happy to see them. It is so hard to take a street child and to watch them as they hope to go home and have established in their little heart that they are loved, that they have a family that loves them, that they were “missable” and missed and to then watch them come home to strangers- to mother’s that don’t hug them or look at them, to dads that aren’t there, or to a grandmother that asks us to take them back.
But maybe tomorrow his mother will love him (she would have to be an idiot not to really). Maybe his mother will be happy to see him again. Maybe this time we will take a street child home to a family where he is loved.
All we can do is pray for God to change hearts and give us guidance, courage, and wisdom.