Heather Bellamy spoke with Becky Murray, Co-founder of One by One.



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Heather: Tell me about the orphanage in Kenya. What's it like? Paint a picture for me.

Stopping To Help People In Need

Becky: We are right out in what I describe the "bush bush", so it's all just mud huts and us. There are no supermarkets for miles, in fact our village shop is a little lady that sits on the street corner selling six tomatoes and a bit of fruit. So it's very remote.

We're in a little village called Bumala 'B. The people there speak Swahili and also their tribal language, so trying to learn both of those languages can be fun. But we've got a beautiful home with 150 kids with us, so it's both a home and a primary school in one. Then we've got a church and a massive play area. The kids had never played on swings and slides before, so the play area has been an incredible blessing.

I think the biggest blessing through it all has been watching the children change throughout the years. Many of my kids moved in back in 2012. In fact we opened the doors of the children's home on the twelfth of the twelfth of the twelfth, which is a date that even I can remember with my terrible memory. Watching those children gradually totally transform has been the biggest blessing and the biggest surprise for me. Once they realised they were loved and they were safe, they dramatically changed.

Heather: How have their aspirations changed?

Stopping To Help People In Need

Becky: When they first moved into the children's home, like you would do with any child, I would ask, "What do you want to be? What do you want to do?" I was surprised that many of them were so in survival mode, that they didn't have any point of reference for what I was asking them. So they would reply with comments like, "Will I get another bowl of rice?" or, "My aspiration is to have a bed to sleep in where I'm not going to be beaten up at night," or, "To have someone to call Mum". I remember being utterly shocked that these children had no remit for even dreaming for tomorrow, because they were simply trying to survive for today. Yet now fast forward four, five years and suddenly they're dreaming of being politicians and pilots and pastors and teachers and doctors and they're aiming high because now they suddenly can.

Heather: You've also got a project called The Dignity Project, tell me about that.

Becky: Two summers ago, I was out in Kenya at my children's home and I had a mummy come to the school gates and she said, "Mamma Becky, will you pray for me? My daughter's been missing for three months." In that moment I was trying to rationalise in my head, thinking, "She's probably split up with her husband and he's removed the daughter." I'm trying to rationalise how a child can go missing for three months. So I prayed with her there at the school gates.

Within days of that I had a second mum come up to me saying, "Mamma Becky will you pray? My child's been missing for five months." Her husband was still on the scene and there was no way of rationalising it. So I began to look into why on earth there's missing children.

Sure enough, human trafficking is a huge issue in our area. In our area of Kenya, there's no national framework and many children are born without birth certificates, so, in all honesty, it's a trafficker's paradise.

So I began praying about what I could do to help. How can we stop this?

The Dignity Project
The Dignity Project

We found out that many times it syncs up with the fact that girls don't have sanitary products. So a girl will miss a week of school every month because she doesn't have access to sanitary equipment. Because of this, by the time she finishes primary school, she's missed a quarter of her education. As a result of that, she can't go on to secondary school and so she's looking for any job opportunities. Tragically, this is normally the moment when a trafficker will come. They know when primary school is finishing and many children are out looking for jobs.

So our aim is to target the girls before the traffickers do. Knowledge is great power and so we go into schools and we train girls all about their bodies and we give them reusable sanitary equipment. We give them underwear. Tragically many of the girls in our region don't even have underwear. Such a basic thing that we don't even have to think about and they don't have it.

We teach the girls all about human trafficking; about when and how a trafficker is likely to target them. Then we give every girl a dignity bag containing underwear and a re-usable sanitary product, which can last for over a year. Every girl gets four of these pads, so it helps keep her in school.