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THE PROJECTS Tumaini Children’s Home
At present there are 54 children living at the Home. The children range from 6 months to 15 years of age. As you can imagine most of them have already led tragic lives and little is known about them. One little child was found, abandoned, at a busy roundabout. This had a profound effect on us all and reminded us of why we all work tirelessly for this charity. Many of the children living at Tumaini Children’s Home arrive with serious and complex medical and psychological needs. Recently a young girl arrived who had been repeatedly abused. This prompted Tumaini Children’s Home to immediately set up a partnership with AIDS Orphan, a UK charity offering psychological and emotional support for children who have experienced trauma. This partnership is ongoing.
Sirio School The Clinic  The Clinic facilities within the Home are vital to maintaining the health of the children who are infected with HIV and are on the necessary drug regimes which require constant monitoring by health professionals. The Tumaini Charitable Clinic is a recent project development, funded in partnership with Rotary International and Mombasa Rotary. The aim of this clinic is to provide complete primary health care services on subsidized rates. Out-patient care to the local community includes consultation, examination and dispensing of medicines and injections. A nominal fee is charged for consultations, making the clinic particularly accessible to the lower income groups in Bamburi district. A Management Committee was set up to manage the day to day running of the clinic. The task for this committee will be to run the clinic on a non-profit basis. Our focus at Tumaini Homes of Hope has always been to secure long-term sustainable funding for the welfare of the children now and in the future. Now that the home is complete, with welfare facilities close at hand, and in receipt of support locally and internationally, we have committed to taking care of the education of every child presently living in the home for the next 10 years; what better way to make a difference to a child’s life than to educate them!
Mother to Baby Prevention Transmission
Having focused for a number of years on establishing provision for orphaned and vulnerable children we are now looking at developing community based projects that will help PREVENT the spread of HIV/AIDs virus. To this end we have recently launched a mobile outreach clinic on the site of an existing Feeding Programme (see below). The clinic will offer general health care but its focus will be the prevention of mother to baby transmission of HIV. With early intervention the risk of the baby becoming infected with the virus drops from between 30-40%. We feel that this is a really important step towards eradicating this dreadful disease. One alarming and often overlooked way the virus spreads through the population is from mother to child. The virus can be passed from a mother to her child during pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding. It is estimated that 102,000 children in Kenya are infected with HIV through mother to child transmission. A continuing high incidence of paediatric infection occurs due mainly to inefficient or inaccessible Mother to Child Transmission services. Poor access to healthcare means that less than 40% of women give birth in healthcare settings. The impact of this on mother to child HIV transmission is detrimental. However, the transmission can be substantially reduced by giving the mother and baby the right drugs, at the right time, during pregnancy and birth. With the right medication prior to the birth, it is possible for the newborn baby to acquire its own immunity and not be infected by the mother. Sometimes it can be as simple as giving the mother and baby one dose of medicine. The mobile clinic will provide medication and counselling to mothers who have the virus and offer medical services to families unable to reach existing provision. Through the clinic we hope to offer ante and post natal care, treat disease and infection, reduce the incidences of recurrent disease, prevent the spread of disease and reduce mortality rates in children and mothers. The clinic will also provide antenatal care which will include a four visit immunization package integrated with Malaria prevention, HIV post natal care, early detection and referral of complications with a focus on pre-term babies. In some cases the mobile outreach clinic will also provide case management of diarrhoea in children and, where use of facility care is low, case management for pneumonia, severe malnutrition and malaria. As well as prevention work, we are also working hard to identify orphaned and vulnerable children in other areas in desperate need of help. Article: Leeds NHS duo’s Africa trip to fight Aids in babies >
The Feeding Programme The Feeding Programme takes place every Sunday operating from a site behind the Coca Cola bottling plant to the north of Mtwapa. It is well worth a trip to see and help hand out the food and load the trays. You arrive to see hundreds of children from the poorest and most needy homes lined up. Having walked several miles to the site, some as young as 4 years carrying babies on their back, some 13 and 14 year old pregnant girls, wait quietly and in an orderly queue to be given this food. Donations are very welcome for both of these projects.
The Gift School
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