Dorcas Children's Home is a youth shelter run by Ugandan locals, supported by foreign volunteers. All are welcome, but do remember to tell Sam when you're going to arrive...
by Geoffrey Pakiam
(click on thumbnails for full-size images)
A SHORT HISTORY OF DCH
Dorcas Children’s Home (DCH) is the brainchild of Sam Mutabaazi, a local Ugandan Christian. It all began 8 years ago when Sam was running a transport business and a provision 
shop in the capital of Kampala. Sam had a series of dreams in which God told him to sell his businesses and go out into the streets to care for street children. He began to make contact with a few of them. Eventually some children decided to take up his offer to stay with him at his house. Sam fed and clothed the children with proceeds from his businesses. Meanwhile most other Ugandans thought he was going crazy.
As word got around town that Daddy Sam was becoming a saviour of street children, the numbers who came to ask for help grew, and it became obvious that alternative living arrangements would have to be made. Following some unsuccessful experiments with rented housing, Sam managed to work with a group of Swedish volunteers, buying a piece of landed property in the suburbs of Kampala and building a new house there. This house became the Dorcas Children’s Home, named after Sam’s wife. Currently, it houses 28 boys and 6 full-time staff who stay on-site, including Sam. The boys range from 6 to 18 years in age. Some are
AIDS orphans (having lost one or both parents to AIDS) while others’ parents were killed in wars or accidents. Some have parents who mean well, but simply lack the capacity to care for them all year round. The Home therefore helps to pay for their living expenses and school fees.
Shaban Kawanyera, 14, came to the Home in 2004. His ex-Congolese parents had gone separate ways; his father went up north never to be heard from again, while his mother still lives in the same village as DCH. Shaban has a sister who often comes to do the odd bit of housekeeping at the Home for some little money. With his sister and mother nearby, Shaban isn’t really an ‘orphan’ in the literal sense, but without the support of DCH he would not be able to attend school any longer.
JOHN MUKASA AND SUNDAYJohn Mukasa is about 9 years old. He attends primary school in the nearby village and has been ranked among the best in his class consistently. He came to the Home in 2003.
Andrew Muyingo is about 16 years of age. He prefers the nickname ‘Sunday’. Sam found him about 6 years ago searching for food in rubbish heaps and sniffing glue. Substance abuse is one of the biggest issues Sam and his staff confront when dealing with children fresh off the street. Street children in Uganda can be very wild, distrusting of outsiders, and will sometimes try to steal anything they can lay their hands on. It takes months, even years of care and patience, to break the old habits. These days, the ex-street children in DCH can be said to be all rehabilitated. Sunday used to be a skinny little boy with a big drug problem; today he is doing his ‘O’ levels and is one of the most senior boys at DCH. When I left the home in January, I entrusted him with the record-keeping of the Home’s finances; he is incredibly astute and honest. I came to rely on him a lot to help me pass on information amongst the other boys, as he had considerable respect and influence amongst them, and also had the Home’s future in his heart.
Matat is an Israeli backpacker who came to visit the Home in October 2004 and ended up staying for almost 3 months! She quickly took a shine to the youngest boy of the Home, Medi, and spent a lot of time practicing alphabets, numbers and colours with him. The other boys often got interested in the learning activities and would tease Medi for not knowing ‘the simple stuff’ well 
enough.Matat also mended the boys’ torn clothes, bought all of them mosquito nets, sang and played with them, and even helped me to double-check figures in the financial accounts I was drafting for the Home. We spent a lot of time together and became close friends. Everyone at the Home really missed her when she finally left in January 2005.
TIME FOR CHILDHOOD
The boys at DCH are expected to attend school full-time, do their share of daily chores and attend the twice-weekly extra lessons conducted by part-time teachers engaged by Sam. With the schoolwork they bring home to do, their schooldays are busy ones. Their holidays are much less packed, and the older ones are encouraged to do some form of part-time work to earn a little money of their own. The rest of the time is theirs to do as they please.
JOHN SSENOGAJohn Ssenoga is about 13 and spends a good deal of his holiday time mending the shoes of the local villagers, as well as the residents of the Home. We have a little corner stall set up for him to ply his trade during the holidays, and it helps to raise the profile of the Home within the local community as well. He was really one of my favourite boys; I used to go into town to buy him 
supplies for his repair kit whenever things started to run out.
Here’s a story: I stumbled out of my room early one morning to find that Peter and a few of the other boys had just dipped all the yellow and light-coloured chicks into a basin of green paint. A couple of mother-hens were completely soaked in the stuff as well. After taking a minute to 
retrieve my jaw from the floor I asked them why they were doing this.
Peter looked at me with the sweetest face and said earnestly, "This is so as to stop the eagles in the sky from eating our young chicks. They won't be able to see them in the grass now."
"Do these eagles also go after the adult chickens?" I asked him.
"No, they're too heavy for the eagles to carry - only the younger ones are easy to catch." said Peter straight
away.
I examined the birds. The little chicks were lying on their sides. Initially they looked like they were about to die. The mother hens were totally stunned and weren’t moving either. Their feathers were all plastered together by the paint.
I went on: "So why are the adult hens green then? Totally green from head to toe."
"Erm...they got too close to the young ones." offered Peter as a possible answer.
I gave up trying to figure things out after that. Fortunately, the only serious casualty from this episode was my mental health.
SAM SSENFUKA
Sam Ssenfuka, 18 years old, currently attends primary 5 classes at the local village school. He isn’t the brightest of the DCH boys, but certainly one of the most sociable and open-hearted. He still needs to be reminded to wash his bed-sheets. His friends on the street were the ones who took care of him when he became homeless, and brought him to Sam Mutabaazi’s attention five years ago. It’s unlikely that he will ever attain secondary standard education. I worry about how he will make ends meet should the Home be unable to continue providing for him in the near future. Sam was one of my favourite boys as well; he never judged me and was a benign, undemanding presence when I was feeling lonely and stressed out from the work I was doing at the Home.
AND AS FOR ME...I stayed at the Home from August 2004 to January 2005. So what was my role there during those five months? After some bungled attempts with tuition, I ended up becoming the office manager-cum-record keeper of the Home. Somehow I even ended up doing the annual accounts because no one else had the time to sit down and work them out for free. I hope the efforts paid off. My financial records tallied with Sam’s previous estimates of the Home’s annual expenses, and I am a lot more confident now that the Home will do even better in an external
audit. With many charities in the news for corruption and abuse of resources, it becomes even more important to ensure that those organizations which do the actual good work are not slandered.
SOME GENERAL ADVICE
So here is some pretty simple advice from me, gleaned from five long months of sweat and toil: don’t try to save the world the first time you go abroad, no matter how much you want to. I had to deal with many personal problems during my first extended stay; these included homesickness, loneliness, physical ailments and often not knowing whether what I was doing was really making any difference whatsoever. Such issues must never, ever be underestimated. Broadly speaking, effective and far-reaching volunteer work takes a lot of time, multiple visits, and an intimate knowledge of the circumstances you work in, not to mention the people you deal with. Ugandans, like people everywhere else, run the gamut of characters; some will be incredibly kind while others can be absolute bastards. Most others probably fall somewhere in between these two extremes. As a first-time traveler, if you go in with few expectations other than to find out how other cultures live and celebrate life, I guarantee you will get all of that, and it may even be a genuinely enjoyable experience.
