Young, homeless boys get high on streets of Kampala, Uganda’s worst slum.
e has bandaged the wounds of homeless children whose limbs have been torn off by rusty, metal-jawed bear traps. He has soothed a 5-year-old after an attempted abduction at a time when area children are being stolen by Ugandan witch doctors who murder, dismember, and bury them alive in the belief that such atrocities will bring prosperity. He has transported a dozen children fevered with malaria to a hospital, not knowing how many would survive the ride there. He has seen children die. He has comforted children who want to die. And he has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with people who believe these kids deserve to die. Yet Patrick Ssenyonjo, 23, says his faith has taught him to look up and reach out rather than sink into bitterness or hopelessness. “God is good,” he insists, his faith unshaken in the face of so much pain. Referred to by the children as Daddy Patrick, Ssenyonjo knows what it is to come from the streets, as he lived there himself with his sister, Allen, for many years before an American missionary discovered their plight while they were still teenagers. “The woman was on her way to Ethiopia,” Ssenyonjo explains from the safe house he operates in Bulenga, just outside Kampala. “But she stopped in Uganda and saw my sister and me on the streets and had pity on us and rented us a house. We couldn’t believe it when we went into our new house. It was all so new to us. I remember the first time we flushed the toilet, we ran out of the house screaming, we were so scared.” Shortly after they settled into the two-bedroom house, he and his sister were walking to church when they heard a child crying. They found an infant in a sack—a little girl around 1 year of age. They took the child to church with them and showed her to their pastor. “The pastor said, ‘We don’t know what to tell you to do. There’s nowhere to take her.’ So we took
H
her home with us,” says Ssenyonjo. “We knew how blessed we were to have that house, and we wanted to share it, so soon we had many children living with us. And the little girl, we named her Elizabeth, she is still with us and is happy and healthy and is doing great.” In the five years since then, Ssenyonjo and his sister, as well as friends locally and internationally who have come alongside him, have transformed what started out as an informal outreach to orphans and street kids into a government-registered nonprofit. He now runs the safe house through his NGO, Raising Up Hope for Uganda, while his sister operates an orphanage in the city. Ssenyonjo’s heart has always been drawn to the street children—children widely considered to be a nuisance at best and, at worst, completely disposable. Often the kids turn to drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of hunger and abuse and the fear of violence. “All we can say is that these children face immense challenges,” says Faith Ojambo, program director at the Uganda field office of Compassion International, which tries to prevent children from becoming homeless by intervening through a child sponsorship program. “Like all street-living kids, they are exploited sexually, battered, insulted, stigmatized, and absolutely despised. Some NGOs have stepped in to help them, but their support is like a drop in the ocean.” Grisly measures of control The Ugandan government has tried to address many of these issues as of late, but the impact is negligible. For instance, in an effort to “get kids off the street,” the authorities are simply picking up children from Kampala and locking them up at the notorious Kampiringisa Rehabilitation Centre, according to a 2010 report by the Uganda Human Rights Commission. The UHRC
35