Inspired Individuals

“I knew I was nobody – I was of no value to anyone,” Caleb told us the first time we met him. He had grown up on the streets of Kampala, Uganda having left home at the age of 7 after the unexpected death of his younger sister. He worked as a porter at the taxi ranks. He lived on tips and scratched through bins for leftovers. “Life on the street is hard but the worst time is at night – you have nowhere to go” Caleb said. “It is hard to believe that there is a God who cares when you are eating from the garbage.”

Caleb taught himself to read and write and joined formal education in senior primary – paying his school fees by cleaning classrooms and mowing the school lawn. He did so well at primary school that he won a bursary to attend a Mission School for secondary education. It is obvious that Caleb had learnt to be streetwise, but high school became a place of transformation for him. It is here that he found faith in God.

Today he is married, has children of his own, and is called by God to reach out to those who live on the streets and to help them on their individual journeys of transformation.

The cities of Africa are filled with children who live on the streets – they come from places of poverty, from homes ravaged by HIV, from communities displaced by war and disaster and for them there are no effective social services. Very often the church overlooks these children – they too see them as nothing.

In understanding his own route to wholeness, Caleb has designed an intervention that is simple yet transformative:

• It is built on relationship – he gets to know the children living on the streets – and through this he starts to address the most basic of needs – that I am someone – someone with a name, someone who is known.
• Caleb offers children a place to belong – a place to go home to at the end of the day – a place to sleep, in safety, a place to share food and a family to belong to.
• Each house is run by a young adult who mentors the children – not trying to convert them to Christianity, but rather loving them and helping them to live in the way of Jesus.
• Finally, he mobilizes these children into community service, giving them a sense of self worth that they are contributing to society.

Most of the children still spend their days on the streets, they still beg for food, they still work at menial jobs. They still sleep on mats or boxes on the floor, they still wear dirty clothes – but now they belong, they have value, they are being transformed.

Some eventually go home – but for many, Caleb has become  a father, a brother, an uncle and a friend. He has seen them graduate from high school, been to their weddings, held their children and loved them.