YOUR DONATION IS MATCHED! 

Our total fundraising target was $61,500. A donor has matched already the first $5,000!
Read below for more details, but this is the breakdown:

• Phase 2: $11,500: Boys dormitory + furniture + toilets/washing units: goal is reached!
  
• Phase 3: $50,000  girls dormitory with furniture! This fundraising is ongoing.

Here is why we can use any support you can provide: 

From October through November, 2022, three heavy storm cycles came from over Lake Edward and caused a lot of havoc at Rwenshama fishing village, home of our partner organization BACHO (Banyabatumbi Cultural Heritage Organization; bacho.sahaya.org).
 The heavy rains made the river swell, and several times, in the middle of the night, heavy floodings entered the lower parts of the village. Akiikih (founder of BACHO)  and his team had to rescue some children. Akiikih and his wife took 11 of the children to his own small home to provide them a place to sleep. Another 6 children are sleeping temporarily at a home that is currently still under construction for a family.

A lot of the huts got irreversible damage. While some of them already collapsed, others at the verge of collapsing. Even if the walls of the hut weren't damaged, many of the children lost all their personal belongings, such as clothing, school materials, food materials, as they were swept away by the water or damaged irreversibly.

The few public toilets in the village also had severe damage. The flooding is causing now major contamination of the water with urine and feces, with high risk for cholera and other diseases.

For more pictures and videos, please click here.

We take it for granted, but having a safe home is so important !  Besides the elements of the weather, there is the danger of wildlife (elephants, hippos, lions, buffalos and more) that regularly cross the village, especially at night. They can barge in if the doors of the house or hut are not closed or are not strong enough! Now that's scary....

This picture below shows Akiikih (in the center) with his wife and baby, and the other children currently living in their small home, sleeping as sardines at night. We appreciate the big love of Akiikih and his wife towards these children very much and will do our best to help them!

We are appealing to your generosity to help this community, which has a lot of orphans and children living with HIV.

Any donation, of any amount, will be much appreciated and helps us one step further.

In a first phase, we wanted to address the most urgent needs: to give the children proper clothing, shoes, and other personal items (simple bedding materials etc). To help the children most severely affected with personal items, we estimated approximately $100 per child, so that would be $1,700 for 17 children. Thanks to a fundraising campaign by a Sahaya volunteer, this goal has been met and the materials have been purchased and distributed.

In a 2nd phase (target goal: $11,500), we are working on a solution for the urgent need for housing for these kids who lost their huts:

• Boys Dormitory. Earlier this year, thanks a generous donor, BACHO was able to purchase its headquarters it was previously renting.  This infrastructure is fortunately also at a higher elevation in the village and thus, not affected by the recent floods. These headquarters are a half-finished tourist lodge with only a few rooms that were completed. However, one large room in the lodge, originally intended to be the dining hall, was unfinished, as it had dirt floor, unfinished walls and no windows or doors. We decided it would make sense to convert this room into a dormitory, so that many of the orphans who lost their hut can sleep there. The cost for this construction is $3,500. We temporarily borrowed funds from another project so we could already send this $3,500 over to get the work started. But we still need to raise these funds.
• Furniture. The dormitory needs furniture. The total cost for 10 sets of bunk beds, tables and chairs is $2,000. We already asked a carpenter to start making a few until we run out of funds.
• Toilets: We need to build toilets for the overall community. The price for an ecological sanitation latrine (which has both a toilet and an adjacent washing room) is $2,000 per unit. We hope to build 3 units for the village, for a total cost of $,6000.
• Update December 9, 2022: The target fundraising of phase 2 ($11,500) has been met! Fifteen orphaned boys have already moved into the new dormitory with furniture. See the pictures in the update section (on the top left of this page). As there were more boys than girls who had become homeless by the storms and flooding, we had to make the hard decision to give priority to the boys for this first dormitory. Construction of the toilets and washing units is in progress.

In a 3rd phase,we want to build a girls dormitory. As there is no room that can be converted into a dormitory, we will have to construct a whole new building. The estimated cost for this, including furniture, is estimated to be in the range of $50,000. We know this will take a long time, but we figure that we can start with it now and we will reach the target some day! The fundraising thermometer on this page reflects the fundraising towards this goal for the girls dormitory.

Any donation, of any amount, will be much appreciated! And if you ask your friends to join, you can

Many thanks!

No matter how hard the circumstances, Akiikih does his very best to keep the kids engaged in music and arts to give them hope. A day after this picture was taken, one of the orphans was noticed to be sitting alone, and crying. When Akiikih's wife went over to comfort the child and asked what was wrong, he replied that he was overcome by emotions of happiness. He had first lost both his parents, and then saw his hut collapse in the storm, and had given up hope. But now he felt safe again in the hut of Akiikih and his wife, being surrounded by their love and care. 

Below are some pics of the exterior and interior of the room that is currently already being worked on and will become a dormitory to house approximately 10 children and youth.

Below are some pics of the flooding, including huts that have collapsed or are on the verge of collapsing, and damage to the shared toilets. For more pictures and ciips, click here. 

And to conclude, this clip below shows the close coexistence of people in Rwenshama, and elephants. The youth of the BACHO football club were practicing when suddenly 2 wild elephant bulls entered the field and interrupted the practice. The clip below shows that elephants had been observing the youth and are fast learners... Note these these are 100% wild elephants!