Help For Africa's Future

Year after year, Americans Hugh and Marty Downey spend half the year in Denver, Colo., and the other half on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, where they run a home for orphaned children.

When they return to Kenya, local children welcome home the man and woman they called father and mother.

"They're my kids. It's my family," says Hugh. "[It] used to be when I saw kids like this, it would just break my heart. But after 40 years, when I see these kids, I see hope."

Forty years ago, as an Army communications officer stationed in East Africa, Hugh Downey became consumed by the disease, destitution and death he saw surrounding Africa's children. Thousands of mothers and fathers were dying each year from cholera, dysentery and malaria.

"It's not enough just to cure a person, but to teach them how they got sick and how they can avoid becoming sick again," says Hugh. "But that's a very immediate thing. If you want to have a lasting impact on the people and on the community we serve, it has to be with the children."

When Hugh was a 22-year-old man with big plans, he dragged his reluctant bride, an American teacher, to Africa.

"Those first six months, I cried. I cried and I cried," says Marty Downey. "But once I got involved in the work and saw the great need and possibilities that we could do, that was the end of that."

Soon the couple had a young son. And with donations from family and friends back home, they built a makeshift children's home and some bare-bones medical clinics in impoverished towns in East Africa.

Then in 1985, they moved on to Matoso, a tiny fishing village in Kenya.

"There was some great need for medical care," says Hugh. "They have the highest infant mortality and the highest illiteracy rates in the entire country."

Small huts became home to 30 orphans. The field where they sat became Lalmba, loosely translated as "hope."

"They're all very, very poor by our standard, but believe it or not, there are some very, very, very poor. There's a difference," says Marty. "So we choose the poorest of the poor."

But their little children's home quickly became inadequate. A mysterious new disease called AIDS was taking hold in the region. Unlike the orphans in the Downeys' earlier children's homes, Lalmba became filled with children whose parents had died of AIDS.

One of the children, Bob, says his parents died before he was taken into Lalmba.

"I was alone," says Bob, who was named after one of the Lalmba volunteers. "I can't take care of myself."

Bob is one of many children facing the same future.

"The children had a very difficult time before we started this little home … which has now gone way out of control," says Marty. "But at the time, we didn't realize what a serious situation was developing."

Kenya has one of the largest populations of AIDS orphans in the world — over a million. Lalmba has grown into a compound, completely funded by donations, mostly from Colorado. Some 45 Kenyans and a handful of American volunteers run Lalmba.

Lalmba has a medical clinic with volunteer American-trained doctors, a lab, a health education center, which has a nutrition class for local mothers, a pharmacy, a loan program for small business-owners and lending library of old donated books.

But perhaps most importantly, about five years ago, the Downeys began an extensive outreach program called Reaching Children at Risk.

"The children that we care for outside of the children's home, during the course of the year, we provide food and medical care, clothing and education for these children," says Hugh.

Terry Thompson, a Colorado nurse, is a two-year outreach volunteer who says he is flattered to be a part of the program.

"[The Downeys] have welcomed me in and they have treated me as one of their own," says Thompson. "Most of the children here don't have parents. As soon as their hip is big enough to put a baby on it, usually somebody has a baby on their hip."

Volunteers, such as Thompson, scour the region for children who have lost both their parents to AIDS and who are so poor that they are likely to die if not assisted.

Recently, Thompson found a young orphaned boy being raised by his 80-year-old neighbor. They had been surviving each day on just one cup of tea. Thompson enrolled him in the outreach program, but he will remain living with his neighbor.

"She'll get two tins of maize a week. She'll get a blanket," says Thompson. "He'll get school uniforms, school fees paid for and free medical care at Matoso clinic."

And all the children in the Downey's care have to fulfill one major requirement: They must attend the local school.

"They have to become something of themselves," explains Hugh. "These are the teachers, these are the educators, these are the health care workers. These are the farmers. These are the fishermen."

Nearly 1,000 Kenyan children are now part of the Downeys' outreach program. The Downeys would like to help more children, but 1,000 orphans is all the program can afford. Still, they say, their work will continue through the people they've already helped in the region.

"This is a big achievement for the people of the area because this is just like luck, which has come from heaven," says Christopher Bobo, the chief of the community. "Hugh and Marty have started educating the community. They have started orientating the community on how to manage these resources for themselves."

Some of the orphans even say they will continue the Downeys' work when they become adults.

The Downeys say the success of the program has help children get clinical care and shelter. But the fundamental spirit was missing some years ago.

"[The] children that were singing and joyful and so well organized, they weren't that way two, three, four, five, six years ago," says Hugh. "[It] took years to get them to that point and they're still not where they will become. They're just beginning their life. They're allowed to be children for the first time in their lives."