Deborah (in red), a 14-year-old Rwandan girl who lost her parents when she was young, at Gisimba Memorial Centre orphanage in Kigali. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KIGALI, Jul 11 2014 (IPS)

Every day, 14-year-old Deborah wakes up in an orphanage, goes to school, and comes home to an orphanage. It does not matter when or for how long she leaves the orphanage, she always knows she’ll be back.

“This is where I live, this is my home,” says the teen, sitting at a wooden desk with other children at the Gisimba Memorial Centre orphanage. She has been intensely colouring in a nativity scene of one famous family – Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus.

Deborah had both her parents for only three years, before her mother died. Her father passed away two years later. Both had AIDS. Her four sisters and brothers also live at Gisimba Memorial Centre, in the Nyamirambo quarter of the Rwandan capital.“Decades of research show that orphanages cannot provide the care children to develop to their full potential, leading to attachment disorders and developmental delays that can be physical, intellectual, communication, social and emotional” – communications consultant Annet Birungi

The original Gisimba orphanage was founded by Peter Gisimba and wife Dancilla, and began taking in children, orphaned through a variety of circumstances, in the 1980s. The couple died in the late 1980s. When the orphanage was renamed the Gisimba Memorial Centre in 1990, it was home to 50 children and had reached its capacity.

That was until the 1994 genocide when up to 700 people took shelter in Gisimba. “People were sleeping in the dormitories, outside, everywhere, as long as they were together,” coordinator Elie Munezero tells IPS.

Close to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed during those bloody 100 days.

Today there are about 125 young people living at the orphanage. “All generations,” explains 50-year-old Munezero. “Babies, infants, adolescents, young adults.” The youngest is two years old. The two eldest are 30. About 40 percent are aged under 16.

Deborah and the other siblings are just some of the estimated 2,171 children today languishing in 29 orphanages across the east African country, says Annet Birungi, a communications consultant for Rwanda’s National Commission for Children (NCC) and UNICEF.

Nine years in an orphanage, in Deborah’s case, does not shock Birungi. She points out the alarming results of the National Survey on Institutional Care, conducted in 2011-2012 by Rwanda’s Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion (MIGEPROF) and groundbreaking NGO Hopes and Homes for Children (HHC). It found thatabout 13.6 percent children living in institutions had been there for more than 15 years.

Staying in institutional care can scar children for a lifetime, with those aged between 0-3 years especially vulnerable.

“Decades of research show that orphanages cannot provide the care children to develop to their full potential, leading to attachment disorders and developmental delays that can be physical, intellectual, communication, social and emotional,” says Birungi, adding that “abuse, neglect, physical and sexual violence, isolation and marginalization are common in orphanages.”

Before colonial rule, there was a culture of treating “every child as your own”, notes Birungi. “Children were for the community and when a mother died, it was a responsibility of aunties and grandparents, family friends to take care of the orphan (s).”

The atrocities of 1994 are said to have left at least half a million children without parents. During and after the genocide,women informally took in children from the opposite ethnic group. Mothers were encouraged to be a “malayika mulinzi” (“guardian angel”). Systems of “kinship and foster care” operated, even if informally.

At the same, this was when most of the orphanages that exist today appeared but most of them lack exit plans for children who have grown up in them.

Meanwhile, the belief that children are better off in institutions than in families has also kept some children in care, says Birungi, and while there is no denying that some centres are able to provide shelter, food, clothing, health and education, they cannot offer the love of a family.

Today, there is no power and no water in Gisimba. Both have been cut off because the bills have remained unpaid, says Munezero. “Nothing is good,” he adds in despair.

A major issue with children being cared for in institutions is that some may still have living members of their family.  “You could be calling a child an orphan but he’s not,” Munezero admits.

The African Child Policy Forum (ACPF), an independent, not-for-profit, institution has reported that the majority of so-called “orphans” adopted from Africa by foreigners have at least one parent still alive.

International adoption was temporarily suspended by Rwanda in August 2010, to allow the country work on implementation of the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, which calls on states to consider national solutions before international adoption.

Birungi says the government wants to revive the culture of “treating every child as your own”. NCC is currently working with HHC to reintegrate those living at Gisimba back into families.

An NCC-trained psycho-social team is in the final stages of the reintegration process and Gisimba will be transformed into a primary school to benefit children in the surrounding area, according to Birungi. On July 10, HHC announced that the first of five children had been moved out of Home of Hope, another Kigali institution.

HHC’s country director in Rwanda, Claudine Nyinawagaga, says a number of alternative care services are available for children in the country, including “kinship care”, when a young person is placed with extended family, neighbours or friends.

But national adoption is yet to be fully implemented and since HCC started the closure of the first Rwandan institution in 2011, only one child has fully undergone the domestic adoption process. NCC-drafted guidelines on domestic and international adoption are awaiting approval by Rwanda’s Cabinet.

“Several meetings with local authorities revealed that the general population and local authorities do not have enough information about adoption,” Nyinawagaga tells IPS. “This is likely to be addressed through the approval of the adoption guidelines, and the sensitisation of the community.”

So, for the time being, Deborah remains in an institution.

“I like singing and drumming,” she says, when asked what she likes doing in her spare time. “We have a small choir that I’m in.”

Despite her plight, she is ambitious and looking forward to her future: “to work in an industry, and make fruit juice and yoghurt.”

Like most residents of her children’s home in Osh, Nargiza is a part-time orphan. Her father disappeared when she was born and her mother works long spells in Russia. Nargiza has no siblings and doesn’t know her grandparents. But she does see her mother from time to time.

“I live with my mother when she is in town,” says the wide-eyed 10-year-old. “No one comes to visit me when my mother is in Russia. She says nobody gives us money and that is why she must go to Russia to work hard.”

For many, the words “orphan” and “Kyrgyzstan”, when said in one breath, conjure up stories of international adoption scandals, corrupt middlemen, and a moratorium on adoptions by foreign parents. But for sociologists and psychologists, the larger tragedy is that thousands of children with living parents are ending up in Kyrgyzstan’s orphanages in the first place.

They are the so-called social orphans – the offspring of those who leave the country for long periods in search of work. With Kyrgyzstan’s growing poverty, and widespread labour migration, the number of these children is on the rise, experts say.

According to her teachers, who agreed to speak only if the girl’s name was changed, Nargiza regularly attends school, but the instability upsets her development.

“Nargiza’s mother takes her home only occasionally. Being a single mother, most of the time she is in Russia looking for work,” said Nargiza’s teacher Zoya, who declined to give her surname in order to protect Nargiza’s privacy. “The little girl still does not have a birth certificate, and her difficult situation negatively affects her school progress. She is quite reserved and does not socialise much with other children.”

Government dysfunction has left many children to fall through the cracks, says Edil Baisalov, the recently appointed deputy minister of social development.

“Government social support to needy children is not organised,” Baisalov told EurasiaNet.org. “The government does not deliver proper assistance to children in difficult situations. How can it possibly be that 10- to 12-year-old children in the 21st century do not have birth certificates?”

According to research conducted by My Family, a UNICEF-funded NGO in Bishkek, today over 11,000 children live in Kyrgyzstan’s 117 children’s homes, sometimes referred to as orphanages. Most are admitted for one of three reasons: the death of a parent (22 percent); a family’s difficult financial situation (21 percent); or divorce (14 percent). Only six percent have no living parents.

Though Kyrgyz families, according to Baisalov, adopted over 1,000 kids in 2010 and as many in 2011, My Family says the number of institutionalised children is increasing with Kyrgyzstan’s worsening poverty. The Kyrgyz National Statistics Committee reports that 36.8 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2011, an increase of 3.1 percent over the previous year.

Poverty is what’s driving the labour migration. By many estimates, 800,000 Kyrgyz – or about 15 percent of the country’s population – are working abroad in Russia and Kazakhstan, mostly doing menial labour like shoveling snow in Moscow or cleaning up in fast-food restaurants.

According to the World Bank, in 2011, the last year for which statistics are available, remittances totaled the equivalent of 29 percent of GDP, making Kyrgyzstan the third-most remittance-dependent country in the world.

“With the growing poverty in Kyrgyzstan, the number of social orphans is growing as well,” said Nazgul Turdubekova, the director of Bishkek-based League for the Rights of the Child, an NGO.

Turdubekova says the government’s 2011 Social Protection Strategy, which aims to provide financial help to children in low-income families, “does not work.”

“There is no effective government programme to deliver social assistance to low-income families,” she told EurasiaNet.org.

Moreover, statistics overlook the vast number of children living with their extended families, says Gulnara Ibraeva, a sociologist at the American University of Central Asia. “Considering the volume of migration, the real number of children living at relatives’ is much higher” than any statistics show, Ibraeva said, warning that the family as an institution is “disintegrating”.

“The life of the child has fallen in value. Children become a crushing burden for parents. The government does not care for children in need. It is a systematic failure. It is a systematic problem. We have several lost generations,” said Ibraeva.

Turdubekova blasts the government for sending the lion’s share of cash benefits to institutions, rather than to families in need, in effect making the institutions “compete” with families.

“The government uses most of its resources dedicated for needy children to finance children’s homes, allocating 6,000 to 11,000 soms (126-231 dollars) per child per month; parents from low-income families receive only 500 soms (10 dollars) per month per child,” Turdubekova said. “The difference between 6,000 to 11,000 and 500 soms is huge. Naturally, it turns out that needy families cannot compete with the government, and they are forced to take their children to orphanages.”

Moreover, through waste or graft, the money sent to institutions is not wisely spent, Turdubekova said: “The child actually receives only 30 to 40 percent of the aid. The rest is spent to maintain buildings, for utilities and staff salaries.”

Even if the funding were reorganised, it would probably do little to stem labour migration, and not help children like Nargiza. But it could make it financially viable for more parents to leave their children with relatives, which psychologists argue is usually preferable to state-run institutions.

Ibraeva, the sociologist, believes authorities must rethink their spending priorities. The government gives each family 1,100 soms as a social benefit at the birth of each child. But the amount paid as a “funeral benefit” at the death of a family member is much higher: Between 1,850 soms and 7,100 soms, for unemployed and employed, respectively.

“What is of greater value – birth or death? Of course, both are sacred, but as more money is spent on death, it appears death is more valuable in Kyrgyzstan,” Ibraeva said.

*Editor’s note: Hamid Tursunov is a freelance writer from Osh.

This story originally appeared on Eurasianet.org.

Orphanages like this one house thousands of children, but are unable to provide residents with more than their most basic needs. Credit: Sana Altaf/IPS

By Sana Altaf
SRINAGAR , Dec 23 2012 (IPS)

Seventeen-year-old Afzal is an unusual orphan. Though his father died many years ago, his mother is still alive and living with Afzal’s grandparents and younger siblings in a house not far from the orphanage where the boy has spent most of his teenage years.

Once a month, on the day when his mother and younger brother come to pay him a visit in the Bait Ul Hilal orphange in Kashmir’s capital Srinagar, Afzal has, briefly, a reason to rejoice; but his excitement is short-lived. As soon as visiting hours are over, he is left on his own again, wishing he could return home with his family.

Like thousands of other children in Kashmir, Afzal has been orphaned not by the death of his parents but by crushing poverty.

“We are poor. My mother cannot afford my schooling and my upbringing,” he told IPS simply. This is Afzal’s fourth year at the orphanage in his hometown of Kupwara, which is home to thousands of children.

His mother, Farzana, added, “Afzal will starve if he lives with me. At least he gets proper food, clothes and an education in the orphanage.”

Farzana told IPS she no income, and runs her family using the money she receives from a local NGO.

Other children living in Bait ul Hilal have a similar story.

Not a day goes by when frail, dark-complexioned Nabeel does not wish he were back in his own house, with his mother and three siblings.

“My father was a militant and was killed five years ago. I have lived here ever since, as my family plunged into poverty,” Nabeel told IPS.

Nabeel’s mother says the only reason she sent her son away from home was so he would have a chance to get a proper education.

“I cannot pay for his school, books and other expenses. I earn only 55 dollars per month working as a domestic helper,” Arifa, Nabeel’s mother, told IPS.

In 1986, before the armed uprising cast its shadow over the Valley, Srinagar had a single orphanage. For the most part, kindly neighbours or relatives adopted orphaned children.

But the number of orphans has risen sharply after the insurgency claimed the lives of about 100,000 Kashmiris, mostly young men, many of them fathers.

The UK-based NGO Save the Children recently put the number of orphans in Kashmir at 214,000 , 37 percent of whom have been ‘orphaned’ – either directly, due to their parents’ death, or indirectly, through poverty – by the conflict.

The orphanages spread across the Kashmir Valley are full of children who still have one parent – mostly mothers – but have been driven by destitution into state-funded homes.

Zahoor Ahamd Tak, chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Yateem Trust, a large local orphanage in the Valley, said that most children living in orphanages around Kashmir have mother and grandparents.

“But after losing their breadwinner, the family faces immense poverty to the extent that they are unable to bring up their children,” Tak told IPS.

If the government provided some financial support to such families, Tak added, they would not resort to sending their children away from home in a bid to keep them fed, educated and cared for.

Emotional needs neglected

But while families insist they have their children’s best interests at heart, experts point out that food, clothing and education do not come close to satisfying emotional and psychological sensitivities.

Ripped from their homes and placed in centres that do not have the resources to attend to more than the residents’ most basic needs, these ‘orphans’ are now developing mental disorders at an alarming rate, experts say.

A recent survey conducted in orphanages around the Valley by Dr. Mushtaq Margoob, a renowned psychologist, found that nearly 41 percent of the residents suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while a quarter of the children living in these homes showed signs of major depressive disorder.

The study also found a 7-13 percent incidence of seizures, attention deficiency hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and panic and conversion disorders.

While some homes have been able to address the emotional needs of the children, and create a ‘home away from home’, most orphanages end up provoking or exacerbating psychiatric disorders.

“Children placed in orphanages at a young age and for long periods risk developing serious psychopathologies later in life,” Margoob told IPS. “They have troubled interpersonal relations and face grave problems in parenting their own children.”

The specialist psychiatrist agrees that orphanages, which tend to neglect “intellectual and emotional needs”, are breeding grounds for mental health problems.

He strongly believes orphanages should provide a social environment that offers close and stable relationships between members.

Bashir Ahmad Dabla, a sociologist at the University of Kashmir, added his own concerns about the developmental impacts of this “unhealthy” trend.

“These children may have lost their fathers but sending them to orphanages (strips them of) the love they could receive from mothers, siblings and other family members,” Dabla told IPS.

The moment a child is admitted into an orphanage – and made to live on the sympathy of strangers, even though they have a family of their own – it changes their outlook on life and society, since they are viewed as outcasts and sometimes even a burden on society.

According to Zahoor Tak, 80 percent of orphans are unable to continue their education after the 10^th grade,which is when they are sent back to their homes.

(END)