katefereday
katefereday
| Forum role | Member since | Last activity | Topics created | Replies created |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Member | Aug 6, 2007 (18 years) |
3 years | 1 | 0 |
- Forum role
- Member
- Member since
Aug 6, 2007 (18 years)
- Last activity
- 3 years
- Topics created
- 1
- Replies created
- 0
Bio
On St Valentine's Day 1998, whilst in Gondar, a city of well over 180,000 people in northern Ethiopia, Kate Fereday Eshete met a young orphan boy called Kindu. He was barefoot and wore ragged trousers. Thin, hungry, caked in dirt and crawling with flies and lice, he spent his days begging on the city's streets or searching for scraps of food in hotel dustbins.
Kate fed Kindu and his friends from the street, some as young as 3 years old. Knowing that she would be leaving Gondar soon, she visited the local social affairs department to find out what was being done to help the street children. Under-resourced and over-whelmed by the scale of the problem, the social workers welcomed Kate's interest but were unable to offer a solution without funding.
Determined to help Kindu and children like him in Gondar and elsewhere in Ethiopia, Kate founded The Kindu Trust in England in March 1998. She named the new charity after 7-year-old Kindu because it was her encounter with him that inspired her to take action.
Young Kindu
During its first four years the Trust was able to set up seven homes and one night shelter in five locations in Ethiopia, taking into residential care 80 vulnerable children and employing 43 full and part-time staff to care for them.
An important turning-point for The Kindu Trust came when a senior social worker who is an expert in Child Affairs was invited to visit the homes in Gondar and Addis Ababa to make suggestions for improving the way the Trust worked in Ethiopia.
He recommended that instead of providing residential care for needy children, they should concentrate on childcare within the community - in other words, close the children's homes and reintegrate the children into society, reuniting them with relatives or placing them in foster homes, with continuing guidance and financial support through the well-established Kindu Trust Child Sponsorship Scheme.
The 'Family Reunion Programme' that undertook this task was remarkably successful and over the past year the Trust has continued to thrive, helping more children and families than ever before.
Read through the various pages on this website to learn more about the work of The Kindu Trust and how it helps, in such a real way, many of the needy children in Ethiopia.
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