n orphanage largely funded by the kindness of Bermudians is now up and running in Kampala, Uganda providing a home to ten children.

Children in the Restorers of Hope orphanage sleep nine to a bedroom in triple-decker bunks luxury compared to their previous lives begging on the streets with no food or water during the day, vultures circling overhead, the only pleasure available huffing petrol or glue.recently spoke with organiser Christine Atcheson to get an update on how her new orphanage is progressing.

In 1999, Mrs. Atcheson visited Uganda, where she heard of the war in the North, where children are drafted into the ranks of the ?Lords Resistance Army? (LRA). On this journey her heart turned towards the orphans of the civil war, and of AIDS, and she decided to start Restorers Of Hope. Her organisation is now a registered charity in Bermuda and Uganda.

?We have held it at ten children, but we can house between 25 and 30,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?We want to make sure that the first ten are getting all of their needs met before we start bringing in more. There is no point in going out and bringing in a slew of kids and then they are not properly being taken care of.?

Mrs. Atcheson soon learned that furnishing a house in Uganda is a little different. Instead of going to a furniture store, she had to buy bookshelves and tables from off the street. ?The carpenters literally made the furniture by the side of the road,? she said. ?And then they display it there so it gets covered in red dust. It was hilarious because as soon as they saw me, it was like a mother duck with all these ducklings walking behind. Everything I looked at they would immediately bring ten of them in different colours and shapes and sizes.?

She furnished the entire house including bookshelves, beds, an extra long dinner table and other things for just $5,000.

There are so many children living in desperate straits on the streets of Kampala that the orphanage found themselves with four children before they even opened. Their first resident was Ronald, a ten-year-old boy they found sleeping on the floor of a railway station. Ronald has now grown quite a bit, and photographs of him show a boy glowing with health. He lives with Milton Agaba, the pastor who oversees the orphanage.

?There are two ladies in Pastor Milton?s Church who have AIDS,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?One of them nearly died. The relatives didn?t feed or help her, and they kept saying why don?t you hurry up and die. She had two little boys. When Pastor Milton found her she was laying on the floor skin and bones. He thought the boys had AIDS too because they were also emaciated.?

But it was later discovered that the boys did not have AIDS, they were simply malnourished. ?We rescued the children and we rescued the mother, but we didn?t bring the mother into the home. We can?t start doing things out of our mandate because then we would get into a real mess,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?We found accommodation for her with one of the ladies in the church. It was very simple, she was probably staying on her floor, but she had food and drink and would be bathed. We took her two boys Jimmy and Jonathan. The other lady with AIDS in the church also had a little boy, Victor. We are not sure what happened to Victor, but when we first saw him he was completely emotionally shut down. He was nonfunctional. I don?t know if it was the shock and trauma of seeing what his mother was going through. He wasn?t in good shape. It wasn?t physically, it was emotionally, so we took him in.?

Victor and the other two children are now happily housed at the orphanage. They run, they jump, they laugh they play checkers and attend lessons. They also receive health lessons. ?We trained the staff in some basic stuff ? general hygiene which is quite lacking sometimes,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?A lot of the illnesses could be prevented. I took a huge waterfilter, so all the tap water can now be filtered in the house. That will stop a lot of illnesses right there.?

The waterfilter looks like two buckets piled on top of one another, but it makes the water drinkable.

When asked how the orphanage volunteers know which kids on the street need help, she replied, ?You just know.?

?We pray and ask God to lead us to the right people,? she said.

An example of this was one day when Mrs. Atcheson was in Kampala with the pastor. They were not there looking for children, but were on some other errand.

?As we crossed the road we saw a little girl standing beside the road,? she said. ?Her clothes were hanging off her and she had sores on her skin. Her eyes and nose were running. She really didn?t look good.?

Mrs. Atcheson soon learned that the girl?s mother had come down from Northern Uganda where there is a war going on. The little girl was one of several siblings who lived with the mother in a slum outside of Kampala. ?Her mother sent her everyday to the streets of Kampala to beg,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?If they don?t get anything, these kids will be beaten at home and will get no food.?

Mrs. Atcheson told the little girl, Deena, about the orphanage, but said that they had to talk to her mother first.

?She jumps up. She is walking down the road, and she is covered in sores,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?At one point she looked up at me and gave me a smile and held out her hand. I had a feeling that whatever was on her skin was highly contagious, but you have to be like Jesus to these kids. I took her hand and we were laughing and skipping to the car. Then I noticed that we were being followed by this little boy.?

The boy was her younger brother, George, and he was in worse shape than Dina.

?His hands and feet were like elephant skin and all swollen,? she said. ?He had an eaten in sore on his neck. Pastor Milton and I have both worked with people who have AIDS so we are both hard to shock, but we were both like ?whoa?. There was no question in our mind even though there was a mother alive, that if we didn?t rescue these children they wouldn?t be alive in three months time. Their bodies were disintegrating.?

The mother was only to happy to give two of her children to the orphanage. In fact, she wanted the Restorers of Hope volunteers to take them all.

?We said ?no, we will take these two because they are in bad shape?,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?We took them straight to the house.?

In the house, a separate bathroom, and bedroom was reserved for these two children, because of health concerns. In the bathtub the two small children scrubbed violently at themselves.

?I thought, ?they are scrubbing away more than dirt here?,? said Mrs. Atcheson.

A doctor in a nearby clinic found that the children had a host of illnesses including scabies, rabies from bat bites, and little George had syphilis. ?We had loads of medication for them,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?We had to keep them in a separate bedroom and bathroom.?

By the time Mrs. Atcheson left to come back to Bermuda, the fear had gone from Dina and George?s eyes and their health was much better. Unfortunately, some of the kids on the streets are not as easy to help. Sniffing petrol and glue is a common way for them to cope their grim lives.

?There are not a lot of girls on the street so we think that there is some kind of industry that is taking them,? said Mrs. Atcheson.

At the moment, the orphanage is homeschooling its children, but organisers would like to send the children to a regular school, and be more of a home and less on an institution. ?They are very bright children,? she said. ?They just need to be given a chance.?

The children usually go about in bare feet or use flip flops. They have a special pair of shoes they wear to church. When lessons are taught at the orphanage the children insist on putting on their church shoes, because they take the education given to them as a privilege. Mrs. Atcheson is hoping that some Bermudians will donate money towards school fees and medicine for the children.

Many Bermudians have already stepped forward to help. ?An older lady in Bermuda sent a huge cardboard box full of supplies from a dollar store,? she said. ?Every time she goes to New York or Florida she asks us what we need. She has sent school supplies and books. This time when she went up she bought us some clothes. We badly needed some inexpensive things for the children.?

Restorers of Hope have recently started a project with widows in the community. They are helping them to sell hand woven baskets and necklaces crafted from old newspapers. Some of the necklaces are being sold in Bermuda for $10 a piece.

When Mrs. Atcheson returns to Uganda at the end of this month, she hopes to rescue some children living further North in Uganda in refugee camps.

?That is quite a dangerous mission so we are asking for a little prayer from people in Bermuda,? she said. ?Pastor Milton has been up there before and he said it reduced him to tears. He was frustrated because they would not release any children to him as a pastor. You have to officially be a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), which we are now.?

Many of the children that Pastor Milton saw were badly burned in fires set by the Lords Resistance Army (LRA).

?They?d escaped running from their huts that were burning,? she said. ?There are no doctors, no nurses and medication in the camps. Pastor Milton said he found it almost unbearable, but he is looking forward to going back and being in a capacity that we can help.?

To sponsor a child: email Christine Atcheson at godshopetherock.bm or go to www.restorersofhope.org . To make a donation either go to the website or contact Mrs. Atcheson at 297-4876, or mail to P.O. Box GE 390, St. George GE BX, Bermuda.