Brighter Future's Prem Nivas Children's Home FOR ORPHANS WITH HIV

Prem Nivas (loving home) provides comprehensive care and education for almost 40 orphaned children with HIV. We find these children when our team visits local villages. They are also brought to us from village leaders or members of the community who find them living rough in the jungle. When they first come to us, the children are often extremely malnourished with HIV-related infections. The amazing thing is that with a couple of months of care, good food and of course medication, the children make a wonderful recovery. Sadly it takes a lot longer for them to heal emotionally. These children have suffered the horrors of watching parents die, and have often been the sole carer for their dying mum. If this wasn’t bad enough, the young children have faced rejection from remaining family members because of HIV. Grief-stricken and alone, they have to fend for themselves which is virtually impossible because of sickness. Brighter Future offers these children their first experience of living in a stable, nurturing environment with regular meals and medical care.

Why is prem nivas children’s Home vital? As a parent, we want the best for our children. We want to give them love, care, positive experiences, opportunities, and of course an excellent education. We’d like them to have all the things that we had as a child, and more besides. Our aim is to give them the skills for the best possible future. For people with leprosy, the story is very different. Can you imagine how you would feel if you were so poor and hungry that you had to make your child work in a field rather than in a classroom? What if the only way you could feed your baby was to send another of your children out to beg, wondering if they are safe as you are not there to protect them? Survival is your priority, not school or your children’s future, even though you know that without education you are condemning them to the same fate as you.

Prem Nivas children with their teacher