Juma

Birthday

History

It is difficult to say 'No' when children are in need. Therefore, we decided to accommodate four more children on November 26th, 2008. We wanted to avoid the situation of their getting separated and spread over different children's homes. Since it is now getting quite crowded in the children's house, we pushed on with the furnishing of the girl's house, and hope that the first girls can move in January.

Mwanajuma (13 years old), her brother Ibrahim (12 years old) and their cousins Micky (7 years old) and Juma (6 years old) lived after the death of their mothers first together with their grandmother. However, the grandmother got again married and actually did not want the children. In addition, we were told that she wanted to force Mwanajuma into prostitution. Later they lived with a relative in the leprosy village. This is a small community of former lepers and their families within our village Msambweni. Since this relative can more or less not do anything with her crippled hands (we see her regularly begging in Mombasa), Mwamajuma had to work a lot on the field and was always responsible for cooking. As it looks now, Ibrahim is the only one that has gone to school.

It took hours to collect the children, we even had to involve the police, since a woman one of the boys was with wanted to attack us. Now they are all save and sound with us, and we can now finally ensure they get all the care they urgently need. As with Mary, innumerable maggots had to be removed from feet and hands, apart from this they were also generally not in a good physical condition. They had all four infectious wounds all over the body.

Career

July 2009: Before they came to us Juma and his brother Micky have not been to a kindergarten or school. Since children in Kenya learn English, how to write, read and calculate already in kindergarten, Juma and his brother Micky are for now in kindergarten. After the summer holidays we take it from there. Juma speaks English already quite well and is a nice guy. Somebody taught him to say “Schade Marmelade”, and you hear it quite frequently when he is playing memory. When playing football he broke the collarbone; the fracture healed well.

November 2010: Juma is now in class two and his school performance is very good, despite the fact that is ill quite often. He has regularly a sore throat, and, to this horror, the physician advised eating lesser sweets.