While southern Africa is renowned for a village/extended family approach to raising children, there are more than 20,000 street children in Kinshasa alone. The reason for this is that poverty, high mortality rates amoung adults, war and forced migration have severely crippled their ability to act on these values. Thus many children find themselves on the streets or in homes like Georgette’s.
For more background see ‘Why is Georgette’s Home Needed’ below.
Your donations support orphans and abandoned children by providing:
A loving home: Georgette cares for 54 children at any time, with two staff to assist her in taking care of the children’s physical and emotional needs. With food prices doubled during COVID-19, the monthly cost is $5,700, or $105 per child every month, which will reduce to $60 per child when food prices return to normal.
We invite you to consider a monthly donation to ensure Georgette has the resources she needs for the children’s daily needs..
A quality education: In 2012 Georgette founded a K-12 school for her children and the neighbourhood, called Le Chevronné. The school is self-sustaining from neighbourhood school fees, and is now in its eighth year of operation. All of Georgette’s children attend this school, their fees paid by donors like you. In addition to school fees, once a year the children also need new uniforms, shoes, and school supplies. The total cost per child for a year is $360, or $90 a trimester, plus $90 once a year for uniforms and supplies.
We invite contributions to school fees and costs at special events, or monthly contributions of $30 a month. Leave your email address with us if you’d like to be invited to these events.
A livelihood: Currently, 17 of Georgette’s children are in university, at a cost of $1,100 each for tuition and books. They each earn additional funds for their living and other costs. We seek out sponsors for these students – people in Canada who work in the fields the students are studying.
We invite you to contact us if you’d like more information about the six students for whom we’re currently seeking sponsors.
For a deeper understanding of the work that Georgette does with the children, the faith and philosophy behind her work, and how we came to be involved, see the video interview with her here.
Upon completion of a program, they are ready to support themselves and a family of their own.
In Georgette’s 20 years of mothering work, she has guided 81 orphans and abandoned children through to responsible adulthood, supporting families of their own. These 81 people would otherwise be living in abject poverty with no chance of providing their children a better life than they have.
Many of these youth give back to the orphanage with their time. Rebeccah returns once a month to do the girls’ hair. When metal doors and windows need to be manufactured, Mbuta offers his welding services at a deep discount. Guylain hopes to provide discounted medical services when he graduates.
Georgette cares for 54 orphaned or abandoned children and youth at a time, from kindergarten through to graduation with an income-earning trade or profession. We are committed to care for them with her.
For each one who enters Georgette’s care, there is hope that the cycle of poverty may end. That hope is fulfilled when they graduate with skills to earn incomes, attitudes to overcome barriers, and a childhood filled with love from Georgette and their family of over 50 siblings.
Why Is Georgette’s Home needed?
The people of the southern Africa are renowned for their community approach to raising children (it takes a village to raise a child), for their concept of ‘ubuntu’ (“the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”), and for their understanding that the term ‘family’ includes grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins as one unit that share freely in what is needed to sustain life, raise children, and care for the elderly.
What has happened then, that in Kinshasa alone, it is estimated that there are more than 20,000 street children – children without families to support them?
Briefly, based on conversations with Georgette and others, here are three factors we are aware of:
- poverty has had an enormous impact on the ability of extended families to care for their relatives’ children. Many times we hear that relatives must choose between everyone in the home starving, or letting some children go – a terrible, terrible decision for anyone to take on. These children are often left in churches, with the hope that someone will take them in – and several of Georgette’s children came to her in this way;
- the mortality rate amoung people of child-rearing age (20-ish to 40-ish) is very high in DR Congo. There are many causes for this, but the single underlying cause is that living in extreme poverty shortens lives – specifics include significantly reduced resistance to diseases, forgoing personal safety in order to earn money, very poor housing conditions, and lack of access to medical care. Even if only one parent passes away, the remaining parent often cannot provide for their children, and must put them in the care of others;
- war in Congo has had a significant impact – displacing and separating families, deepening poverty, and traumatizing an entire generation. Some of the children in Georgette’s care are there as a direct result of the impact of war on their families;
- some street children are the result of migration – families come into Kinshasa to find work or escape a violent situation elsewhere and things don’t work out, income collapses and the situation becomes desperate. With the extended family all living elsewhere, and return to home territories either too costly or too dangerous, the children eventually end up on the street, or find their way to homes like Georgette’s;
Without homes like the one that Georgette provides, these children have very little chance of exiting extreme poverty, or providing that opportunity to their children.
Your support to Georgette provides her with the resources she needs to take these children in and provide them with the caring and support required for them to grow up to raise strong resilient families of their own, ending the cycle of poverty they would otherwise be in.