Safe home
Children transfer directly from street life to life on the St George programme. We offer them the opportunity to completely turn their lives around, with our full assistance. From the moment they join our one year residential programme, their days as street children are considered over.
Each year, the newly recruited children are told, some weeks in advance, exactly what we offer; we ask for a commitment from them before they enter the programme. This ensures that they are ready to play their part once enrolled and that they can feel the full benefit of a stable life immediately.
Home for the coming year is the Grafton Scout camp which has been transformed into a residential centre for up to 60 boys and 30 girls at a time and their ages are typically between 7 and 15. Grafton is a village about ten miles from Freetown and offers a quiet safe environment away from the temptations and dangers of city life.
Before and after images of the Grafton Camp refurbishing we did:
The children very quickly settle and calm down and for the first time in a very long time they can actually feel safe and able to act as children again.
The children are fed a healthy diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables. They soon find that their health improves, they grow rapidly and their energy levels improve. Often the children have stomach problems and are covered in sores when they first come in. Many have illnesses (including a lot of venereal diseases) gained on the streets, which have to be dealt with. As soon as they join us they receive medical attention and the vast majority of medical issues are successfully dealt with in the first weeks. Thankfully we are very fortunate in two areas: we do not have a large number of HIV positive children as it is not a major issue within the local community, and we do not have a huge problem of drug taking to deal with.
