The sum of the parts: what working together for children really means!

Have you ever had to study for a particularly hard exam, spending all night awake, drinking Colombia out of coffee and racking your brains over one particular question you just don’t seem to get? And how many new mums have felt so desperate when bedtime arrives and their tiny infant just doesn’t seem to want to settle down and go to sleep? “I should know what my child needs!” might race through your mind.

There are many moments in life when we feel alone in the face of a certain problem. So what do we do? Well, naturally, we would seek out the advice of someone who’s been in a similar situation. And how often do we actually find that we are not alone; that many of our classmates have found that topic difficult, or that all new mums have felt frustrated at some point? Someone might even suggest a simple solution, “Have you tried swaddling?” that suddenly makes our lives that much brighter.

Here in the UK there are many people and processes in place to help make sure that help is at hand. But what if you are a poverty-stricken Mama and Papa, living in the slums of Kampala, not only scraping together a few coins to care for your own 5 children but also trying to take care of the 2 abandoned children that you found sleeping on your doorstep? These are the kind of people that Viva reaches out to, through our partner networks. People with huge hearts, who want to take care of these children but don’t have the money, the time or the know-how. They can never look beyond what one day throws at them and they rarely get any rest, becoming so completely engrossed by simple survival that they are unaware of what is going on around them and feel alone and desperate.

Situations such as these are exactly where Viva, and that trusty word ‘networking’, come into the game! The city-wide network in Kampala could help this Mama and Papa to meet others in similar situations, and to meet local projects, churches and groups who will provide support, prayer and, eventually, necessary resources. One small project once ran out of mosquito nets for their children, but, through the network, managed to get hold of other people’s spares… Another simple solution to a small, but potentially fatal, problem.

And that chain never ends… Our programme co-ordinator from Uganda recently went to Mwanza to share experiences and spread the ‘working together’ philosophy to other smaller and younger networks in Tanzania. She told the tales of the Kampala network, and how it has grown and developed over the years, surviving some very tough times at first: “We have grown through the sharing of knowledge and experience and have come out the other side a much stronger and more powerful network able to impact the lives of thousands of children!” she shared with the Mwanza network.

“When people are brought together by a common purpose there are all sorts of sparks of creativity,” she commented, after the meeting. “And when that purpose is children, you can just feel the added energy in the room.”

“Have you heard about the Early Encounter programme? It’s a great success in Latin America. That could be a strategy to use with street girls here in Mwanza,” was one of the many suggestions shooting around the room. “In the long term it’s always better to invest time and money into helping children get back to their families than keeping them in residential care,” said the Kampala networker to her Tanzanian counterpart.

And the learning curve continues, long beyond the limits of this article; from the individual to the thousands, this ‘networking’ just keeps going and going…