About a month ago I received an email regarding a little girl named Claire. Claire is approximately three years old and she is HIV+. Claire lives in Uganda and works 12 hours per day breaking rocks in a quarry for approximately five cents per day. The email stated that approximately 60-100 children were found in this quarry - homeless and starving. The sender of the letter had asked if I would be interested in adopting this three year old. They were having difficulty getting her placed because of her HIV status. They had also sent me a picture of sweet little Claire. I knew as soon as I opened the picture that I was suppose to help this child at the very least. My ultimate goal would be to adopt her into my family. Those of you who have been following my blog know that I have looked into adopting internationally for quite sometime. In fact, I was in the process of adopting from Ethiopia when I learned that my niece had been placed into foster care for the 2nd time. This puts everything on the international front on hold. My niece comes first. So, once again, I am prepping the house to re-license it as a foster home. I am very much looking forward to bringing baby V. to Vegas! But what about Claire? Well, I would like to bring her to Vegas as well. At the very least I want to help sponsor her. She needs to get started on ARV medication. Her immuno-compromised little body needs good nutrition, safe water, and a cozy bed to cuddle into at night. She needs to be able to run and play like a 3 yr old instead of slave away in the rock quarry. Please check out the paypal donation button to the right. Please find it in your heart to give anything. Every little bit helps! I have also left my email and would love to hear from each and everyone of you that would like to know more about Claire.
I know many of you think that the picture above is of Claire working in the quarry. I can not in good faith post pictures of Claire without permission. The picture above is of Stephen Batte. A Ugandan boy who was one of the 60-100 children living and working in the quarry. He has earned a little notoriety after he became the subject of an article regarding the children of Uganda working in the quarry. I have re posted the article here:
Ugandan children work on dangerous rock pile
Many risk their lives for a pittance in the quarry outside Kampala
updated 1:16 p.m. PT, Sun., June. 1, 2008
KAMPALA, Uganda - Stephen Batte works in a quarry under the blazing sun, chipping rocks into gravel with a homemade hammer. It's tiring, boring and dangerous.
Stephen is 9 years old. He's been on the rock pile since he was 4.
"Life has always been hard here," he whispers, carefully positioning a sharp rock before striking it with well-practiced accuracy. "But since my mother died, things have been much harder." His mother, the woman who taught him to smash rocks when he was a toddler, was killed here in a landslide in August.
His T-shirt torn and his feet bare, Stephen is one of hundreds of people who work in the quarry on the outskirts of Uganda's capital, Kampala. Their shabby figures sit hunched over their heaps of gravel. The chink of metal against stone bounces off the rock faces.
12-hour days to earn a pittance. Most of the workers are refugees who fled a civil war in northern Uganda. Now they make 100 Uganda shillings, 6 U.S. cents, for every 5-gallon bucket that they fill with chipped rocks. Stephen works 12 hours a day to fill three buckets.
There's no safety code or protective clothing. The children's arms and legs are covered in scabs from flying stones. Stephen says a friend lost an eye.
Rock falls are frequent. Stephen remembers the one that killed his mother.
"She had left the house early to work," he says through a translator. His voice falters. "We did not know that she was underneath the rocks — not until we saw her sandals.
He remembers her when she was showing him, as a toddler, how to crush stones.
"I sat next to her and she showed me how to hold the hammer. It's not easy and at first I would hit my fingers so I cried a lot. It made my mum very sad but she said we had to earn money to buy food."
Now he works alone at the quarry and spends his meager earnings on food. He sleeps in the crumbling mud hut he used to share with his parents and baby sister. He says his stepfather abandoned them after their mother's death. The sister, 8 months old, was put in an orphanage.
"If I stay in the house I feel lonely and I fear the memories," he explains. "So even though I'm tired when I leave the quarry, I go and play football with my friends."
No help for urban refugees. At the height of the 22-year conflict between the government and a brutal, shadowy rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army, almost two million people fled. Most ended up in squalid government-controlled camps, but advocacy groups estimate that there are up to 600,000 in the cities.
A truce has enabled many of the camp-dwellers to go home, with food, tools and building materials provided by the government and aid groups. But the urban refugees don't qualify for help and have remained unregistered and invisible.
When Musa Ecweru, the minister of relief and disaster preparedness, visited the quarry, relief workers had to meet his car two miles from the site because his driver couldn't find it.
The normally talkative Ecweru seemed at a loss for words at what he saw, and unable to make firm commitments to help. He admitted that the government "may not have appreciated fully the magnitude" of the problem, and promised to bring it to the government's attention.
Then he gave a group of women and children with whom he spoke $30 and told them to divide it among themselves.
Two months after the minister's visit, Stephen's situation is unchanged.
"I wish I could be helped," he said, picking at a large scab on his knee, "but I cannot see another life for me."
Stephen now has a completely different life after being featured on the Internet. My hopes are that the same can be done for little Claire. I have posted below the follow up story regarding Stephen Batte.
WENATCHEE — When Jennifer Kesterson read about 9-year-old Stephen Batte chipping rocks into gravel beneath the blazing African sun for 18 cents a day, she was determined to help the boy.
"How can someone from a little town in Washington help a child in Uganda?" Kesterson, 63, of Wenatchee, asked herself. "But I thought, I have to try."Kesterson, a retired Cashmere Valley Bank employee, read the Associated Press article about Stephen that appeared in the June 1 edition of The Wenatchee World. Stephen had worked in a quarry chipping rocks since he was 4. His mother had been killed in a landslide in the same quarry, near Kampala, Uganda. Stephen told the reporter he worked about 12 hours a day to make 18 cents. "I just prayed to God, 'What can I do to help this child?' " Kesterson said. She said she had recently read a pamphlet about starving orphans in Africa that was distributed at her church. She started looking on the Internet for groups that have missionaries in Uganda and learned about Legacy World Missions, a nonprofit organization in Georgia that helps children in Uganda. That group had a link to Jesus and Me Children's Ministries in Kampala.
Kesterson said she quickly e-mailed Legacy World Missions and David Knowlton, founder and director of the Kampala organization. Angela Warner, executive director of Legacy World Missions, wrote that they had received a lot of interest in finding help for Stephen since the article had gone out on the wire service, but chances of finding him in a country where thousands of children suffer each day were slim.
Warner praised Knowlton and his work with children in the country and encouraged Kesterson to continue writing him for assistance. Knowlton wrote to Kesterson and said he would try to look for the boy himself. Knowlton is a native Ugandan, educated as an electrical engineer. He started Jesus and Me Children's Ministries in 1998 to help Uganda's orphaned and displaced children. The ministry was set up as an official nonprofit nongovernmental organization in 2003, according to its Web site.
Kesterson sent Knowlton a copy of the article and photo of Stephen that appeared in the paper. With the help of the Rev. Gary Warner, Angela Warner's father and founder of Legacy World Missions, Knowlton was able to find Stephen within three days. Knowlton got permission from Stephen's aunt and his tribe to become the boy's legal guardian.
Stephen is now living in Knowlton's home, where he has his own bed, school clothes and enjoys regular meals. He is being treated for malaria, which many children in Uganda have. And he's attending school for the first time. Knowlton has written about the rescue triggered by Kesterson's concern and financial help and posted it on his Web site. Legacy World Missions has also used the good deed as an example of what can be done.
Kesterson said she sent Knowlton $500 to help with Stephen's care and has offered to send $100 a month. She said her husband, Larry, a retired Chelan County PUD line foreman, are equally excited about the help they are able to offer.
Angela Warner said Monday that Stephen's rescue never would have happened without Kesterson's persistent drive to help. She said she has met Knowlton, knows his program well and would trust him with her own children. She said there are thousands of children like Stephen who need help, but help starts with helping one. "Someday, Stephen will hear the story of the woman who cared for him so much that she powered this through and wouldn't give up," Warner said. "You could see it in her e-mails that she was desperate to help. It was quite powerful."
steigmeyer@wenworld.com
