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Kids for Kids The
Charity that helps children in Darfur, Africa, declared by the UN as being the
world's worst humanitarian crisis.
The Centre for Leadership for Women proudly supports Kids for Kids, a registered charity organisation founded and run by Patricia Parker in 2001. In 2005 alone the charity supplied goats that gave an estimated 11,000 children in Darfur in in the west of Sudan in Africa, access to milk in a land where food is scarce and is being called by the UN the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Kids for Kids has provided water-pumps which supply about 50,000 villagers in Darfur; tomatoes and okra now flourish where once there was nothing but sand. No one is more surprised by all this than Patricia, who set out to raise the money to pay for just one water-pump, and yet she says: “The figures don’t mean so much to me, it’s the individual stories that count.” It was a malnourished nine-year-old boy embarked on a seven-hour trek to get water for his mother and four younger siblings, that first grabbed Patricia’s heart. She went to Khartoum in 2001 to have a holiday with her son who worked in the Embassy there and – as a dutiful fundraiser for the Dorking branch of the Save the Children fund – asked to see an SCF project.“I was sent on a five-day tour of Darfur, an area I had never heard ofdespite it being three times the size of Britain,” she says. Darfur was in the grip of a drought so severe that there was not a drop of surface water. The malnourished nine-year-old was not unusual; women were spending 70% of each day collecting water in a desperate attempt to keep their families and livestock alive. When Patricia met the boy’s family camped in a dried out wadi which they hoped would provide forage for their three goats, she immediately appreciated the vital symbiosis between the boy with his water and the goats with their milk. She discovered exactly how she could help when a water engineer employed by SCF told her that Darfur sits on an aquifer: its water could easily be tapped by water-pumps which, in 2001, could be sunk for as little as £2,000. In Khartoum, Patricia – who had had a successful career as a freelance PR, gaining an MBE for her work for Marie Curie Cancer Care – persuaded her son to hold a lunch for 19 influential people at which she outlined her ideas for Kids for Kids. Before the day was done her Sudanese fund-raising committee was born. Returning to England she began a ring-round of all her friends and plucked up the courage to talk to local primary schools. In six months she raised £45,000; last year her total was £230,000.“Six months after my first visit I went back to see the water-pump Kids for Kids had paid for. I knew there would be a reception, I expected about 30 people but as we approached I saw this shimmering red haze on the horizon. Almost 1,000 people had come to say thank-you.” “One group of women said, ‘we have prayed every day of our lives for water, we never thought it would come in our life-time.’ Patricia sat in the sand with these women and asked them about their lives. Their worst fear, it transpired, was childbirth. In an area where female genital mutilation is almost 100%, it is hazardous anyway. Traditional birthing assistants know nothing but “the rope method” (basically putting a rope round whatever part of the baby you can reach and pulling) and the local hospital was several days’ donkey ride away for most. The charity now funds the training of midwives; it costs £500 each and 27 village women have qualified to date. “We are working on a prototype for a donkey ambulance so the journey to hospital is not so traumatic,” Patricia says. To save operating costs in Sudan, Kids for Kids works through an 'implementing partner' Practical Action (first founded as the Intermediate Technology Group by EF Schumacher to prove the theories in his book Small Is Beautiful) who charge nothing for administration. Patricia is proud of the fact that Kids for Kids work is sustainable: £72 pays to lend one family six goats; after two years that family passes six kids on to another family and so on. To ensure the animals stay healthy, Kids For Kids is now funding the training of Paravets (£120 each): every time a need is realised a new initiative is born. Until recently Patricia toured Darfur bi-annually, however, as the conflict in Sudan has increased so have the dangers. In 2005 she and her son were captured by Sudanese Liberation Army members bristling with arms. They were held for 24 hours – during which time Patricia appears to have charmed them by sketching their portraits and performing yoga – before being released unharmed. Nevertheless this year she invited the villagers to come to her in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, rather than vice-versa. “One man walked 97 miles to come to our workshop; that’s very humbling,” she says. “I want to pass on the message that individuals are not powerless; we don’t have to rely on governments. One goat costs just £12: you don’t have to do big things to make a difference.” (Saga Magazine, UK).
Detailed information is at How You Can Help Kids for Kids |
