Offering temporary residential care to young mothers with newborn babies

The Kenosis Community is based in Bishopstowe, midst a farming community on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg in Kwazulu-Natal.

Our objectives are:

· To live as a Christian Community and to accept and respect one another despite different cultures and backgrounds.
· To serve God by serving one another, our different churches as well as the Pietermaritzburg / Bishopstowe community in which we live.
· To serve the sick, needy and those affected and infected by HIV / AIDS, with a special focus on vulnerable children.

When Kenosis was established in Bishopstowe in October 1995, with the financial support of the Bavarian Mission in Germany, its vision was to start a training programme for young women in lay ministry and, in the long term, to establish a Lutheran Sisters Community. Much has happened in the past 10 years and Kenosis has grown to include a number of other projects: A Cluster Foster Home for vulnerable children and children orphaned by HIV / AIDS; a Kindergarten for 50 underprivileged children from the surrounding area; a monthly clinic and a recently established HIV/AIDS awareness outreach project amongst farm labourers.

Our Cluster Foster Project gives a home to 18 vulnerable children. These are children who, for various reasons, have been removed from their families of origin. The reasons include: HIV / AIDS, extreme poverty, sexual and / or physical abuse and abandonment. We realise that all these children have come to Kenosis from extremely difficult backgrounds and potentially broken lives and we want to offer, as far as it is possible, healing to their brokenness. This we try and do by giving these children a new home, as well as the necessary love and personalised acceptance that they need in order for them to become assertive, self-confident, responsible and caring adults.

Each child lives in a family with 5 other children and a foster mother who takes care of their day to day needs. That the children call their respective mother 'ma', is an indication that they have accepted her as their 'new mother'. Siblings that are placed in our care are not separated, as it is important to us that the children, having in many cases lost so much already, are not robbed of the family they still have. Working as family units means that Kenosis does not have a common kitchen or laundry, but each home works and lives independently. This too is very important to us, as we do not want to be an institution or an orphanage, but we rather want to be a family. For this reason also we have decided not to increase the number of children we have in our care, because then we fear that we may lose the 'family touch', and may run into the danger of losing sight of the individual child.

Another aspect of the children's lives that is important to us is their education. If they are old enough the children go to school in one of the nearby government schools. However, as the school classes are often too big for the teacher to pay individual attention to the children, their educational development is often hampered. For this reason we have introduced 'homework groups' where the children are helped in doing their homework in the afternoons by one of our international volunteers.

Our 'Foster Care Project' which started in 1998, is very important to us, and it is the children that bring life and meaning into the life of Kenosis. It is they that make Kenosis a family. As I have pointed out the children are all placed in a house with 5 other children. The houses in our foster village were built by our workers themselves, who were trained by Valley Trust (another NGO) in brick making and brick laying. We have 6 houses in total in what we call our village. 3 of these are occupied by the foster families and 3 by staff who work on our property.

The first house that was built is very small for a family with six children, especially as the children are getting older and bigger and simply need more space. For this family we are hoping to build a new house that will provide more living space for them. The question that arises is, what do we do with the existing house. As I have pointed out, we do not wish to add to the number of children, as we really want to provide quality care to the individual child, rather than quantity care. However, we do want to use the existing house to support other needy teenagers, who are in many ways still children themselves.

The idea Kenosis has was born from the following story / situation:
In the beginning of the year a young girl (16years of age) came to assist one of our foster mothers. We soon discovered that she was pregnant. After a couple of weeks we found out that her 14 year old sister was also 7 months pregnant. Both girls have dropped out of school; in both cases the father of the child has disappeared; both come from a very poor background with no financial means to take care of a child; and both children are considering 'trying to abort their unborn baby'. This is the story of only two girls and there are many many girls in the same predicament out there. These girls are frightened and helpless, and much too young and immature to deal with such a situation.

We want to offer girls, in such a situation some help. Our idea is that after they have given birth, they can come and live in Kenosis for a limited period of time (maybe three months). During this time they can recover from the birth and think about what the next step for their lives is. The present foster home could house three girls with new born babies. The advantage of having the girls in the village would be that they would be in the midst of activity and there would be assistance and support, including access to a clinic, which also offers counselling right on their doorstep.

Building a new house would cost approximately R180 000- and any support for such a new venture would be greatly appreciated.