Endowment fund OMDC

How was OMDC created?

I started the endowment fund “One More Day for Children” in 2009 with Hellen Gathogo, whom I met during my very first visit to Kenya, where I went for the purpose of learning, and where I myself experienced also the dark side of the country.  I came across the misery and suffering of local slums in Nanyuki. I saw abandoned children living on the street who were sniffing bottles of glue to avoid hunger. I also visited a local children’s home where there were 120 children most of whom were HIV-positive. This situation affected me so deeply that I decided to return to Kenya to help those children. The trip took place three months after my return to the Czech Republic. My goal was clear, namely to establish an official endowment fund both in Kenya and in the Czech Republic, in which I have also succeeded. Since then, I’ve been visiting Kenya regularly every six months, and a small foundation has gradually become a professional organization involved in helping children.

In 2010, the Foundation had already adopted 24 children at long-distance, but the number of sad cases continued to rise.  We were so well-known throughout the Laikipia region that the so-called “child officials” kept delivering new biographies of children who needed our help to us. These were cases when a child was living with an HIV positive mother, or a child was born already with this disease, children who did not have parents, as well as cases of small Maasai girls who were sold into marriage, children whose parents were shot dead due to civilian riots and many other cases of this kind. The number of children was still growing and, unfortunately, we had nowhere to place them. At that moment, I got an idea to build a children’s home. In 2011, the construction could begin because the Kenyan government gave our foundation an area of 20,000 m² near Nanyuki, in town Doldol.

In 2012, thanks to the help of Czech donors and my contribution, we were able to reconstruct the original building for 20 Maasai girls, which included accommodation, but also a kitchen with a dining room and a bathroom. In the same year, the number of adopted children at long-distance reached 43.

In 2013, we found big Czech sponsors and thanks to their sponsorship we started to expand the original building to more buildings. Just like every other half a year, we visited our children, collected information and took photographs for adoptive parents from the Czech Republic, from whom – in return – we brought gifts and letters for our adopted children. In 2014 we registered 85 of our rescued children. The construction of the home continued.

After 5 years of existence of the Foundation, we became a professional organization with 18 Kenyan employees and 5 Czech volunteers who were members of the Board of the Czech Endowment Fund.

This year, thanks to the Kenyan sponsors, the main building was fully completed, including a kitchen and a large hall. 53 children were living in the home. The number of adoptive children our foundation was helping at that time was 128.

Present

Nowadays, the Endowment Fund “One More Day for Children” is a large organization at a professional level that cooperates with a variety of endowment funds from around the world, such as the United States, Great Britain and Kenya. Members of the Kenya Board (Council members) are mostly doctors, lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs and high-ranking politicians of the Kenyan government. On the Czech side, there are four permanent workers who, in their free time, devote themselves to development of our endowment fund. The number of adopted children at long-distance has increased to 120. We regularly visit these children in the spring and in the autumn every year and these visits help us to keep getting new information for adoptive parents from the Czech Republic.

Future

Our vision for the future is to help these children continuously and to reach our goals as much as possible. This means we would like the children to finish their studies successfully or get to university in order to get a chance for a better life. In our children’s home, called the “OMDC Doldol Rescue Center”, we are planning to add more equipment to an already completed medical center so that we do not have to transport children to faraway hospitals, which is becoming more and more expensive because of the expanding number of children in the home. Due to the long distance to school in Doldol, we also would like to build a school for our adopted children. Our next plan is to build an additional building where the children will sleep and create this way a larger rescue center for ever-increasing number of children.