Tigers - About Tigers Club - Returning To Community

Returning To Community

Every child is an individual. The homeless boys of Kampala have varied reasons why they ran away from home and family and ended up on the street. Many are victims of extreme poverty, war or AIDS and all are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
Reuniting children with their own families is the most desirable outcome of intervention, and therefore a priority for the Tigers Club Project. If this is impossible, the Tigers Club Project endeavours to identify caring foster homes for boys under 12, or to invite them to benefit from the S.T.A.R.T. programme.
In all cases, the children are prepared for resettlement at the Tudabujja halfway home and given regular follow-up by visiting social workers.

Resettlement

If a boy wishes to return to his family, the Tigers team will go to great pains to ensure a successful result. Much of the preparatory work for reintegration is undertaken by the project’s full-time social workers and many hours of planning and preparation go into each individual case. In-depth assessment and counselling sessions with both the boys and their families help to gain an understanding of what initially led a boy to the street, and to explore the obstacles and potential for successful resettlement.

The Halfway Home and Farm constitutes a key tool for any successful resettlement. Following an agricultural training curriculum developed and delivered by an experienced agronomist teaches the boys basic skills required for farming with livestock such as goats, cows and pigs, and with crops such as matoke, pineapples, peppers and others. Their daily routine of counselling, work and leisure also allows them to adopt positive behavioural patterns, to adjust to a more disciplined lifestyle and prepare for life away from the streets.
The boys themselves have summed up the spirit of the Halfway Home/Farm and its importance for them by naming it “Tudabujja” which means “we are being made new”.


	At the end of 2002,122 boys (76%) of those resettled had remained in their villages

After their return home, every child and family is followed up by a social worker for at least a year after returning home, and home visits are conducted to ensure that any teething problems are detected early and can be solved through relevant guidance and counselling.
The project also continued to support some of the boys and their families with vocational training and income generation activities such as pig rearing, chapatti- making and improved farming techniques. Families are thus able to break away from poverty and from the realities which, in the past, may have prevented them from appropriately caring for their children, and to assume part or all of the financial responsibility for the child.

About 40 boys are successfully resettled each year.

	Real Lives : Muwanga Robert Robert arrived at the Tigers Clubhouse when he was just eight years old. He was frightened and vulnerable but unwilling to be reunited with his father due to the physical abuse he had suffered. Instead, Tigers took him to his grandparents and heard firsthand the terrors that Roberts father inflicted on the whole family. For his own protection, Mutinye attends a boarding school during the week and is resettled with his grandparents at weekends and holidays. * Name has been changed to protect his identity.

The Foster Care Programme

Many of the boys who come to the Tigers Club Project for support cannot be resettled into their own families, for a wide range of reasons: some relatives are violent, unwilling to feed an extra child or too elderly to take responsibility for the boys. In other cases, HIV/Aids or the legacy of war have left children without relatives to care for them.
When resettlement is impossible, the Tigers Club project endeavours to place boys under 12 in foster families, giving them an opportunity to find family life in another home where they are brought up with the family’s own children and, usually, return to formal education or follow a vocational training programme.
Although many boys have already been successfully integrated into foster families hard work has preceded their return to a home. Families require focused support with fostering children, some of whom have highly traumatic backgrounds, and so Tiger’s provides regular counselling for the boys and families, gives practical support and follows their progress at home and school very closely.

Foster Care Support Day 2003

Special events for the benefit of foster families are also held, mostly at the Tudabujja Halfway Home. Workshops are highly interactive and may cover topics such as communication with children, nutrition and health, discipline, dealing with difficult behaviour, in particular anger and deception, and others.

Boys older than 12 who cannot be resettled are not usually targeted by the foster care scheme but may, instead, be given the opportunity to benefit from the S.T.A.R.T. programme.

	Real Lives : Kevin Sembatya * To add to all the changes in Abdul's life, he now insists we call him "Kevin"! He has a new school, a new family and a new future ahead of him. When Kevin was just seven years old he was abandoned in the city by an older brother and survived by begging in the bus park. He joined Tigers Football Club and from there he was introduced to the rest of the activities of the Club. He does not remember either of his parents as he was brought up by an elderly grandmother who may well have become too frail to care for him and his brothers. After a long stay in the refuge at the Clubhouse, Tigers Club has found a family willing to take Kevin in as one of there own children. He has caught up with a lot of missed schooling and started in Primary 3 this term. A welcome party was waiting for him at his new home and he is settling in extremely well. Kevin is the twelfth child to be found a family through The Tigers Club Informal Foster Care Scheme. Dinah, the Social Worker in charge of the scheme, will visit him and his new family on a regular basis. * Name changed to protect his identity

Preparing for resettlement: Tudabujja, the Halfway Home

Preparation is a vital ingredient to successful resettlement in a home. In order to enable the boys to gradually get used to life away from the harsh realities on the streets of Kampala, to adjust to a more disciplined life-style and to adopt positive patterns of behaviour, a half way home has been established on a 10-acre piece of land overlooking Lake Victoria.

Boys who will be resettled in their families or in foster homes spend a few months here, living in groups of 6-8 in one of 4 cottages, and are looked after by local Ugandan house-parents. Throughout their time at Tudabujja, the boys receive counselling and guidance on their future, learn how to look after their well being and enjoy opportunities for participating in workshops and sports, notably football.

In addition, the halfway home prepares the boys for assisting their families with household chores and income generation. On the demonstration farm, which includes both crops and livestock such as cows and pigs, boys are taught basic agricultural skills by a qualified agronomist.

Tudabujja also serves as a forum for the expansion and strengthening of the foster care scheme. Apart from preparing the boys for resettlement, workshops for foster families and staff are held here.

What better way of summing up the spirit of the place than pondering on its name: the boys themselves have chosen to call their halfway home ‘TUDABUJJA’ which means ‘We are being made new’!