OUR SERVICES

INTERVENTIONS AT NAPENDA KUISHI REHABILITATION CENTRES

Napenda Kuishi Centers have five main areas of interventions in their process of rehabilitation, namely: Rescue, rehabilitation and feeding program, education and medical intervention

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RESCUE, REHABILITATION AND FEEDING PROGRAM

The programs run a comprehensive rehabilitation program for vulnerable and street children that is is modeled in a three-phase strategy, whereby vulnerable minors are rescued from the streets and dumpsites, rehabilitated through a social worker-tailored programs and then re-integrated back to school or to the community.

  1. Rescue and rehabilitation: at the beginning of each year, from January to February, the staffs (made up of social workers and professional counselors) are engaged in street work. Street work on the roads and in the dumpsite is the only way to interact with the youth living on the streets and to invite them to one of the two centers of Boma and Kisumu Ndogo. Once the children are at the centers, the staff conducts multiple activities in favor of the children: informal education, sports, music and cultural activities, counseling and spiritual formation, group counseling, various therapies, work therapy, behavior modification therapies, etc. The period of rehabilitation lasts about ten – eleven months, after which the children are reintegrated in their families and schools. During their period in the Centers, the children receive daily meals, which for many of them remain the only meal of the day, except for the children in the residential home. While the children are in the Center, the staff organizes formation for their parents on responsible parenthood and entrepreneurship skills in order to help the parents run small scale businesses for their livelihood and to be able to feed and educate their children (many children normally escape the tough life in their families in order to fend for themselves as their parents or guardians have no means to support their families)
  2. Reintegration is the phase when the parents, after being located and properly counseled) receive back their children in order to take them to school. It is important to involve them parents at their time when the children join formal education. This is an essential part of the whole process of rehabilitation. We understand rehabilitation in a holistic way: meaning, not only the phase of being in the Centers, but the complete transformation of the children and of their families. That is why reintegration is so important: without a joint commitment of the part of the Centers and the family of the child, all the values that the child internalizes during his or her rehabilitation process and the new behavior the child has embraced run the risk of being diluted as soon as the child goes back to the family. Reintegration (to join a school, to settle within the family, to empower the family itself to be more responsible for the life of the child) is what makes rehabilitation possible and its fruits to last. For this reason, reintegration is something that we cannot renounce, in spite of financial difficulties because youth whose parents/guardians fail to reintegrate them to school tend to relapse and return to the streets.
  3. After care and Follow-up: once reintegrated both in the family and in the school, the staff follows the children in their schools, to check their academic performances and their life in general.