Edith worked with the local village elder to try to locate the abandoned babies’ parents, but their efforts were unsuccessful.
She was then obliged to formalise their adoption. She did this by registering her work as a caregiver at a community-based organisation and orphanage in 2007. The Home of Hope started on the porch of her house, and then in 2013 with the help of international donors, she was able to move her growing organisation – and her family – to the large open compound they are at today.
Edith recalls this as a happy time for her and Derrick. She would take him for walks in his wheelchair outside the compound and remembers how he’d smile brightly at passers-by. Ever since he was born, she had shared a bed with Derrick to watch over him and never stayed away from him for too long because he would cry out for her whenever she left the room. Derrick was “a blessing for the family”, she says.
In 2014, as Edith was now raising four of her own children and a growing number of others at the orphanage, Derrick died of cardiac arrest after a short illness. He was 14.
Derrick’s death devastated Edith. “This is my own womb, my own blood, my own child. I can’t even know how to express that. I still have pain. I’m just learning to live with that pain,” she says softly.
The home suffered. “It perished,” she says.
But over time, she started to think about how to channel her grief into her work and expand it in Derrick’s memory.
Edith says she thinks of him during happy times, but also when things are difficult. “In tough times, I feel I wish he was by my side,” she admits.
“Every time I was with him, we could laugh. He could bring that smile. Whenever I was stressed, I could look at him, and he gives me that bright, light smile,” she recalls.
“The love was a really happy memory.”
It is because of Derrick that Edith says she is doing what she does today.
“I don’t want this [home] to exist when I’m alive and then when I get out of the world, it dies. I know children with disability will continue to exist,” she explains.
Edith set up a hospital to both honour her son and allow the organisation to be more self-sufficient. Home of Hope is 99 percent funded by international donors, and Edith was able to raise the money to build a fully staffed hospital for the children who live on the compound. It’s also open to the local community.
Richard, who oversees all the maintenance, looks after a chicken hatchery that provides the kitchen with eggs and meat.
The organisation hosts therapy and social work students from Europe as volunteers to supplement the work of the full-time staff. Two of Edith and Richard’s sons also work there: Denis, 24, is the operations director, and Francis, 20, is a nurse.
Most recently, they built an assisted living home in nearby Buwenge for those aged 18 and older who are too old to legally live in the compound.
At the main orphanage, the once bright paint on the walls is faded and shows the strains of time, but it continues to provide warm, comfortable bedrooms with animal decals and bunk beds, three meals a day and children’s activities.
Yet its work stretches beyond the high brick wall surrounding it.