Fundraising for Cameroon Orphanage
on The Road Less Travelled (Cameroon), 19/Oct/2011 19:32, 34 days ago
As you may recall I spent almost two years volunteering in Cameroon and recently finished my placement and am now in Boston studying.  While I was in Cameroon I developed a partnership with the Good Shepherd Home Orphanage near Bamenda, Cameroon (the city where I was volunteering). Over my time there I organized some fundraising events to support the children at the orphanage with healthy food. I am planning to continue helping the children of the Good Shepherd Home by send funds for healthy food over Christmas and into the New Year. As the AIDS pandemic continues to strike Cameroon, the number of orphans is increasing exponentially. Due to a lack of resources, orphanages are not able to cater to the basic needs of these orphans who are severely malnourished and usually do not receive elementary education.The Good Shepherd Home is an Abangoh based orphanage founded and directly managed by Sister Jane Mankaa. This orphanage has 86 children aged from a little under 2 months to 18.  A number of the children they support lost their parents to AIDS or were abandoned because of a disability.  The orphanage also has another Annex Orphanage in Batibo, North West Region where there are 42 orphans many of whom are disabled or suffer from epilepsy which is highly stigmatized in Cameroon.Over Christmas 2010 and June of 2011, two projects were carried out, thanks to the generous donations from many of you, to provide the children of the Good Shepherd Orphanage (Abangoh and Batibo) with nutritional and material support.  Indirectly the projects also had the aim of helping to maintain the health of the orphans given that proper nutrition had been shown to reduce illness in the orphans.  Indeed these projects were a success and not only did the children’s health and energy levels had visibly improved due to their enhanced diet but also their success at school has increased. A summary of the Christmas project can be found here: http://ailingshih.blogspot.com/2010/12/cameroonian-christmas-miracle.htmlA summary of the Summer project can be found here:http://ailingshih.blogspot.com/2011/06/giving-children-of-good-shepherd-home.htmlThe Orphanage’s need for support for its children continues to grow. Since the summer the children have started school and the need to continue to give these children a balanced diet is ever present. With the food that was provided with the previous fundraising campaign the children's health has improved. Sister Jane who runs the orphanage told me that: " [She has] discovered that the children have not been sick for some time now. This is because  they eat well now.They have grown healthy . I cannot remembered the last time I went to the hospital  with a sick child. I attribute this to the fact that they feed well now. School books became so expensive and we were so lucky that [the donors] had bought so many books  and other school materials for the children." The orphanage now has four new babies including a set a twins. These babies' mothers died at birth and they had no other family who wanted them.  In addition to these babies, there are also 14 new children that joined the orphanage since June. Sister Jane says: "The number of kids is growing more than we can handle. But still our home is better than where there are coming from. It is so difficult to say no to a child. If we do, it means we are sending such a child to his or her death."I am planning to send money to the Abangoh orphanage for Christmas to enable them to buy food for the children to sustain them over the next few months so that the children can continue to be healthy and achieve scholarly success.If anyone would like to contribute to this endeavor please let me know. You can email me at ailingshih (at) gmail (dot) comThank you,Catherine Ailing Shih