ABRAHAM BANDA writes
Government should come to the aid of the disabled people and orphans who are in dire needs of decent accommodation, says Home of Happiness (HH) chairperson Peter Mwansa.
Mr Mwanza has since appealed to Lusaka City Council (LCC) to help look for a bigger and better place to accommodate the disabled children and orphans.
He said the current place was too small and not conducive for their welfare.
“We need a big and better place to accommodate our disabled and orphaned children. The current place is too small, as you can see, we are renting a four roomed house and we have about 90 children,” said Mr Mwansa.
Home of Happiness is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that takes care of the disabled and orphaned children located in Lusaka’s George compound near Lubuko bar.
This came to light when the Sun visited the centre where its vice coordinator Mr Charles Banda narrated that the organization was initially called Miracle Disabled Association (MDA).
At the start the organisation only concentrated on paying visits and helping elderly disabled people, but later started to also look at the wellbeing of disabled children.
“So on 27th April 2015, it managed to establish a new organisation take care of both the orphans and the disabled children, and that’s how we came up with the name ‘Home Of Happiness’,
‘‘ Initially, we went by the name of Miracle Disabled Association (MDA)which only concentrated on visiting and helping elderly disabled people, but we saw it unfit because we also had disabled children at heart. That’s how we decided to set up this new organisation to help both the children as well as the old. And as at now the number of children has increased to 90 from the initial 7,” said Mr Banda.
Mr. Banda said HH had also introduced a school at the same venue where some of the children were boarders.
When asked about the challenges they faced, Ms Bernadette Tembo the coordinator, explained to the Sun that, the centre lacked sponsorship from the government as it depended on well-wishers to pay rentals and buy foodstuffs for the children.
‘We only depend on well-wishers to help us pay the rentals and buy some foodstuffs for the children. We pay K1000 for rentals every month. And we only rely only on three volunteer teachers who come to teach the children here,
“We are also thankful to the government for recognizing us by giving us the certificate of a non-governmental organisation so that we can be operating in a legal manner,” She explained.
Ms Tembo advised members the public that disability was not the end of life.
“ We need to bring the children in open so that they can be assisted unlike hiding them in homes,” she said.
