More Letters - What is OVC?

I recently spent a day visiting one of our orphan care programs in southern Malawi. I am amazed at the resilience of people there.

For people in western society, the word orphan conjures up images of orphanages or kids on the streets with no one to care for them. This is not quite the image you would walk away with from one of our program locations. Strictly speaking we are not an orphan care program but an OVC program.

So what is OVC? It stands for Orphans & Vulnerable Children. A child with 2 parents can actually be more vulnerable (to exploitation, illness, poverty etc) than a child with no parents. It depends on who their main carer/guardian is.

UNICEF defines an orphan as a child who has lost at least one of their parents. So in our OVC program we visit double orphans (kids who have lost both parents), single orphans (kids who have lost one parent) and other vulnerable kids who may still have both parents. All of them are vulnerable. They have been included on the program by the leaders of the local church and community because they are the most needy kids in that community.

We visited 4 families yesterday. In these 4 families a total of 14 kids are being cared for. 8 of them are orphans. None of the households had a “father” present. In one family the father had been murdered, in another the father had committed suicide, in another he had left when the mother became pregnant, and in the other family there was a disabled child. In 3 of the families, the “mother” was looking after nieces, nephews or grandkids. They have no reliable income or means of support. One mum walks an hour to her garden to try and grow small amounts of maize for her family, or tries to find ”piece” work in someone else’s gardens.

Our volunteers visit these families on a regular basis and help as they can. Some soap here, a new school uniform there, maybe some practical assistance in repairing the roof of their house. It’s all about providing hope in a difficult, even overwhelming, situation.

All in the context of poverty. All these kids are very vulnerable.