En-Gedi Children's Home in Nairobi, Kenya

Margaret Njuguna is from Kenya. She attended Calvin University and worked for the US based World Renew for many years. Her expertise is microfinance and she worked for World Renew in Africa. While she was travelling through towns, she noticed that the beggars were mostly disabled persons. She didn't know much about disability care then.

Margaret was on the planning team for World Renew and every year she asked about starting a program for disabled persons. She was eventually told that no donor would fund a foreign disability care program because any results would be very long term. Yet Margaret still felt called to help children whose families had abandoned them. So, she gave World Renew notice that she would be quitting in 3 years and started planning.

Starting the En-Gedi Children's Home

She left World Renew with a severance package that funded her initially. She rented a facility and started looking for children.

In Kenya when children are born with disabilities it is generally believed that the parents are responsible and they are isolated from the community. Many parents will leave their children out in the wild to starve to death or be eaten by wild animals. Margaret found that when she was told about a child she needed to get to the village within a week or the child would already be dead.

When parents take their infants to a hospital and the diagnosis is something like cerebral palsy or spina bifida, the doctors will often not tell the parents the diagnosis and tell them the child just needs to be fed more and they will be OK. This is actually usually helpful to the children and the families that learn to care for their child will often keep them. Margaret has decided that if a child with disabilities is older than 5 years, she will work to encourage the family and get them resources to keep caring for the child. For children younger than 5 she will rescue them and take them to En-Gedi.

En-Gedi now resides in their own facilities that have enough space for 50 children.

These are the 24 children who are currently at En-Gedi. Margaret is now working on programs for long-term funding of the Children's Home. She is looking to power the water well and storage system by solar power. This will allow her to sell water to the neighbors at an affordable rate. She is also building an apartment house and the proceeds will benefit En-Gedi.

The Rotary Clubs of Kitengela and Hurlingham work with En-Gedi.