Features

The joy, agony of growing up in an orphanage

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3 years ago

VINCENT KURAUN reports that growing up in an environment much unlike a real home may not be the ideal thing, but for most orphans there is no choice, as that remains the only option where they could find companionship, despite future psychological implications.

Joy (not real name) was abandoned by her parents when she was born, for reasons best known to them. She was wrapped, put in a carton and dropped at a busy bus stop in Lagos. Fortunately, she was found by a stranger very early the following morning at the bus station and taken to a nearby police station from where she was eventually taken to an orphanage.

Joy grew into a very cute little girl who was liked by everybody. The question that came to mind was: how could a mother have dumped her own child on the road, regardless of the current unpleasant socio-economic realities?

In reality, poverty seems to be a major factor for placing a child in an orphanage or other institutional care homes in Nigeria. In the case of Joy, no one could say for sure. But she was literally brought up in the orphanage home which, ironically, provided almost everything she lacked: shelter, food, clothing, health care and education.

Growing up in the orphanage, for Joy, was like growing up in the midst of her natural siblings. For a child of her age, life was just normal. But as she grew older and became more aware of her environment, she started noticing that some of her friends in the orphanage were being adopted by families who visited the home. With time, she began to understand better: that she was an orphan, abandoned by her parents to her fate.

She, however, hoped that one day, a family would come for her to be adopted. Days rolled into months and years, yet, nobody came for her and she soon began to lose hope of ever having a family that would show her love and more care.

At age 12, a couple based in the United Kingdom visited Nigeria and decided to visit an orphanage in their locality as was their custom. One afternoon, while the couple was interacting with other children in the home, Joy who had just been enrolled in a secondary school walked in. To the surprise of the couple, Joy looked exactly like their daughter: same height, same complexion, including the sound of her voice. Everything about her matched the couple’s daughter. They immediately took interest in her and started the adoption process which became successful after a while. The couple eventually took her to the United Kingdom.

On getting there, out of curiosity, the couple decided to take Joy and their daughter for a DNA test to clear their doubts. It turned out that both were siblings separated at a very young age. The couple had adopted their first daughter in a different orphanage in a city other than Lagos 10 years earlier.

In Nigeria, the ages of adoptable children in most orphanages fall between three months and six years. The moment a child gets over six years old, they begin to face subtle rejection from adopters while orphanages are constrained to continue keeping them in the home.

However, until family-based care options are secured for children, this institutional care seems to remain the reality for most orphans in Nigeria. But how can the institutions be improved to be comparable to family living? In a bid to get answers to these questions, Sunday Tribune visited some orphanages in Lagos to get a better insight into these issues.

Growing up in Orphanages

Speaking with the Founder/Chief Executive Officer of Compassionate Orphanage Home, Lagos, Dr Gabriel O Oyediji, who doubles as national president, Association of Orphanages and Homes in Nigeria (ASOHON), he disclosed orphans face serious issues in the country. According to him, “there is still a conflict on institutionalisation of children because the children were believed to be deprived of good simulation, direct affection and attention of a real parent. They lack also sense of identity and belonging because of their isolation from their communities,” he explained, adding that new global trends are discouraging orphaned children growing up in institutions as a result of its psychological effects on them.

“The government,” Oyediji explained further, “is saying the new trend around the world is that children are not allowed to grow up in an institution, because they believed that institutional care is not the best. They argued that it deprived the children of real parental care, exposure to knowledge of environment, culture and opportunities to learn other life skills. That is to say, institutional care has negative effects on children raised within orphanage care homes because they don’t benefit from the environment which enable them to develop other important potentialities.”

He explained further that “the recent drive across the world is about alternative options to replace institutional care, but what we do here is that, while in school, we simultaneously introduce them to trades, vocations that they leverage upon and develop in the future to enhance and help themselves before graduating from the university or after university graduation. Some are good in hairdressing, while some are good in barbing. We package vocations alongside their studies to make sure that at the end of the day, they are well-packaged. That is to say that apart from academics, children at compassionate orphanages are exposed to extracurricular activities.

“Another issue is, separating them from the younger ones by creating a home for them, and then you will also discover the abuse of independence by some of them. Some will end up getting pregnant when they are not prepared for it and some get influenced by their friends who derail them. So, what we want to do is to get a permanent place for them and provide them security until they could fend for themselves. In the main time, we are also careful exposing them to a vulnerable environment.”

Nurturing Orphans to be self-reliant

One important step that most orphanages in Nigeria, Oyediji disclosed, is building the children to become self-reliant and ready for life challenges. According to him, nurturing and supporting the orphans to reach economic self-reliance level is the major objective. He noted that the orphanages continue to play the role of being their family homes all the time. He said whenever some of them got married after graduating from universities, officials of the home always stood in as their family members while also following up to monitor their progress. “They are currently living happily with their spouses,” Oyediji announced proudly, but adding that the challenges of running an orphanage home in a post-COVID era are enormous, especially and in an environment where government does not allocate funds to cover social welfare as they do in developed countries.

Cost of caring for Orphans

“It is quite challenging, very challenging in a distress economy; very challenging under an atmosphere of total insecurity and catastrophic fear of political upheaval and ethnic confusion. Meeting the needs of these orphans particularly for private homes which do not have access to regular grants; government does not have allocation for private homes,” lamented.

On the issue of education, he said “the law says every child must be educated and in my own case I have to start up a school for them because there was an era when they kept sending them home from school every now and then. As one is going, another is coming, you will have to be begging schools; so, when it was so overwhelming, we have to start a school for them. Now, our concern and challenge is how to pay our teachers’ salaries.

“Occasionally, some philanthropists do come to take some of them to mega schools for scholarship or sponsorship, but then you will understand that some of them will start and then stop half way either because they lost their jobs or they get transferred and then they lose interest, then bringing them back to a smaller school is usually depressing after being exposed to a mega environment.

“We feel there should be dedicated spaces for orphans and vulnerable children in government and public schools up to university level so that they can also have the privilege of having education. We can also look at the governmental budget; they should make sufficient allocation for social welfare department and supervising ministries to enable them to do their work.

“Sometimes they complain that children stay too long in the orphanage, they don’t know that we also have our own bottleneck. Some of them think it is deliberate that we keep them here to merchandised them or make something out of them, but it is not true. Also the process of adoption is too slow and too cumbersome,” he said.

Rehabilitating ‘destitute’ Children

However, it was a different story at The House of Mercy Children’s Home. Its founder and administrator, Ms Bunmi Awoyinfa, said though the home is not really an orphanage, it still takes care of vulnerable children, homeless or lost to destitution by rehabilitating them and giving them a new home.

“It is a rehabilitation home for out-of-school children whom we register in schools and they live in the home. It is from there that we also reach out to vulnerable children in different locations in Lagos, Ogun and Borno states,” she stated.

Explaining how children come into the home since it is not the usual orphanage, Ms Awoyinfa said: “Whenever we go out on our routine outreach programmes and we see children who should be in school either playing or hawking, we interview them. We follow them to where they live to meet their guardians, relations or parents and interact with them to find out why those children are not attending school. They usually give us a myriad of excuses.

“We then ask them if we could rehabilitate and register them in school and if their answer is yes, then, they will come to our office to fill the child data form and their own details too; they can then bring the children to us. Poverty and broken homes contribute to the plight of out-of-school children. We take in those children because catering for them where they live will be counter-productive. Their impoverished guardians/parents/relations will receive the money meant to send the children to school and spend it and the children will still remain on the streets. Sometimes, women who were abandoned by their spouses bring their children to us because they cannot afford to send them to school and they want their children educated. That explains why we do not have adoption policy in our organisation.”

Asked if the home accommodates children older than 18 years, Ms Awoyinfa said “though, we do not have children who are 18 and above in our home, we train our wards to any academic level they desire. We have one presently in his second academic year in Lagos State University and he comes home on holidays. We rented a room for him in Iyana Iba close to the university. He comes home on holidays. We do not abandon our wards.”

Keeping so many children in school at the same time required huge resources. How then do the private homes do this without support or assistance from government to keep the good work going? Ms Awoyinfa explained their effort is to complement that of government.

“Government has its own setup; we are just complementing their efforts. Government does not give grants to charity organisations. But I will like to mention that our urgent needs are: a functional bus to replace the broken down one and a bigger accommodation to enable us rehabilitate more out of school children,” she stated.

An orphan who would not like to be identified shared her story with Sunday Tribune on her experience growing up in a home without her natural parents and the effects of the experience on her in future.

“It is very depressing and it hurts. I don’t know what it is to have a family, parents, siblings, relatives and cousins, I have never had any but I was determined. I grew up in one of the institutions in the country and we were well cared for. I see the owners of the home as my parents and other children in the home as my family members. The staff of the home were wonderful and loving people and that made a huge impact on my life.

“Despite all the good care, there are still challenges in later life; depression, anxiety and low self-esteem to name just a few emotional effects of growing up in the institutions. The effects of parental separation, knowing you won’t even know your parents for the rest of your life. I personally suffer from depression and anxiety, nevertheless, I have a good life, I don’t battle with addiction and I have a loving husband and beautiful home.”

Though orphanages have helped so many children by providing them with shelter, education and vocational training that they would otherwise not have had but the conditions are not so much as to make it a perfect family-based care option. Policies are still a big obstacle, but while orphanage homes are still being expected to be deinstitutionalised, it is imperative for government to improve those institutions by making adequate funds available for approved orphanages and establish a careful and frequent monitoring system to ensure their compliance with stipulated guidelines.

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