| | WELCOME |  The Helping Hands Project is a community-based project reaching out to young people in deprived communities in the United Kingdom and to destitute children in Africa.
Currently, we have a project up-and-running in Nairobi, Kenya. (The photograph here is of some of our young orphans and one of their carers in Nairobi.)
In Kenya, we are supporting young orphans and their carers, ensuring their basic needs are met, and providing them with education, proper accommodation and medical care. We have a home in Nairobi currently caring for 12 young orphans and we also provide for those orphans left with elderly grandparents in small villages in Kenya.
We started our work in a little village in Siaya district in Kenya, and have now been able to set up a home housing 12 orphaned children and their carers where we have been able to provide for their cost of living and education starting from nursery to secondary schools. If they have no adult relative who can care for them in their own homes, we take them in from an age as early as 6 months.
We try, in most cases, to place baby orphans with the closest next-of-kin or with one of our trained adult carers who become fully responsible and live with them whilst receiving our the Helping Hands Project support.
Some children are placed with families who foster them but receive financial support such as the cost of education, clothing and medical care. They, however, do not ask us for fostering fee as they are happy to provide the care for the children voluntarily. The orphans stay with their foster parents as long as they wish and as long as they are happy.
The Helping Hands Project keeps in regular contact with children and their carers, and where possible we pay a yearly visit to our orphaned children in Nairobi, Kenya.
We also have independent adult volunteer carers who keep regular watch on children and provide extra support to the carers, thereby helping us to monitor the children affairs and regular supervision to the care the children receive.
We support destitute youths and single young parents, by placing them in technical schools, where they undertake apprentice courses such carpentry, auto-mechanics, electronics, information technology, childcare, hair-dressing and so on. We pay the cost of training and buy training materials for them, with the aim of helpimg them to enter into local employment markets and enable them earn enough to provide for themselves and their dependent families. In other cases, we support them to open business which also enable them, in turn, to employ others.
We also support the elderly in the villages by providing them clean water, crops for farming and and, where necessary, we restore mud-and-grass thatched huts. We build them permanent, stable homes by providing building materials to help them replace their old and broken thatched homes with permanent durable homes. Please visit our photo gallery to see some homes we have restored for the vulnerable elderly. In this way we have been able to make it possible for grand-parents to care for their orphaned grand-children.
In some villages we have had to provide care for vulnerable adults who have lost their careers through the HIV-Aids epidemic. We house them by placing them under the care of young families who volunteer to care for them whilst receiving financial support for the Helping Hands Project. We provide support to the carers by paying costs for cost of living and medical care.
By doing all the above, we have managed not only to restore lives but also improve the quality of disadvantaged children and adults and saved lives of many people that would not be with us today.
In the United Kingdom, our work is mainly aimed at hard-to-reach children and youths who are usually from ethnic minority communities and immigrant families, plus those who have been excluded from basic support and services. We also help single parents, and those with multiple health problems.
We provide
- support in gaining access to basic services such as education, housing , employment, financial support and access to legal and advisory services,
- access to recreational activities, we take them to day out trips and help them get into indoor recreational centres,
- general information on support services available in the community, including access to Career Advisory Centres,
- support with personal development, self-advocacy and referral to community services. This we do by befriending the youths and their families and as a team we provide a support not only to the needy youths but also to their families, helping to improve the quality of their lives and strengthen their family unity.
To continue doing more we will need your support. Please leave us your comment or contact details if you would like to contribute in any way. We look forward to hearing from you.
Miriam Cain,
Volunteer Project Coordinator.
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