Emily Graves spoke with Cherish Uganda Director, Rachel Parsons

Rachel: Yes. The interesting thing is that in order to change mindsets you can have programmes and educational programmes and all that kind of stuff; but what we've found has been the most powerful thing is just the evidence of life that our kids are able to show to the community.

One of the unique things about Cherish, is that when we first began in the particular community that we work in, we gathered up all the local people, local leaders and government leaders and we asked them what is this community most in need of? The things that they were most in need of were jobs and education and so we made a pact with ourselves that we would only hire people from the local community if we could help it. Most of our team; the people who work on our farms and in our compounds with the children; in the schools, they're all from our local community. They see children come in straight off death beds from the hospitals and clinics. Children who most people would say, why would you even consider caring for those children because they're about to die? They have witnessed with us God's amazing hand of healing and hope on their lives and what it's like watching kids come back from the dead. It's really phenomenal. They come back into this place of wholeness and the people who are in the community are watching that happen.

When we open our school outside of just opening it to the children in our homes who are HIV positive, we open it out to the wider community of children. We've hand selected children who are most in need. Many of those children, even though some of them are HIV positive, many weren't and many people thought, are people going to want children who aren't positive to be mixing in classes with children who are positive? What will the community stigma be? There's seemingly no stigma! We've had parents with their children lined up down the road waiting to be registered, just fighting over whose children get to be in our school and yet knowing that our children are HIV positive. We have 170 mixed children; HIV positive and not. We haven't even had a first instance where there's been stigma around one of our children living with HIV.

I think when you can improve someone's life and give real life and hope, then it overcomes that memory of people dying and the countless graves. It can't just be words, it has to be seen in action; it has to be seen physically in the lives of children; so yes the stigma is changing.

Emily: How many children are you currently caring for?

Rachel: In our school we have about 170, but in our family homes we have five individual family homes and each home has a mother who looks after eight or nine children. Right now we have 45 children living there.

Emily: Are the mothers from the local community?

Rachel: The mothers are actually from Uganda. We recruit out because we're looking for specific women who love God, who will give their lives to a calling far beyond just the job, because as you well know our Mums cared for us far beyond the call of duty. We want our children to experience the same sense of value and belonging. We look for mothers who aren't married. We look for mothers, who are either widows or haven't been married, or perhaps they have children but the children have grown up and are out in secondary school and are able help them to support their children. We look for a particular mother. Some are from near to our community and some come from a little further away.

Rachel Parsons

Emily: You said earlier that you hope to expand the school. Do you hope to bring in more homes?

Rachel: Yes we do. Right now we have five and we have the funding to build two more and we will be breaking ground to build those homes hopefully in the next month or so. It's very exciting because it means 16 or 17 more children will come in and live with us and be rescued from literal death, which is incredible.

Beyond that we want our work to flow over; the village is based on four principles, which we call the hope principles. H is health; love is the O, which is actually our heart shape and then P is prosperity and E is education. We're trying to model those hope principles, but what we are hoping is that those principles will flow out into our local community and change the lives of people living locally in our community. That's the second aim.

As part of that we are building a health centre to serve our local community and the wider district, but beginning with our local community. We are also looking to add to our education portfolio a secondary school, because many of our children are now coming up to the end of their primary education and with the secondary school we're believing that we'll be able to offer both the academic side of things, but also vocational. We have some partners who are willing to move forward with us and do a carpentry school. Also, we would love to begin a studio where young people can learn all kinds of things; mixing, editing, radio, TV presentation, filming and editing. There are so many different streams of education that can all be flowing out from one idea, which would be a studio to change children. Uganda is a place where people love to communicate. Ugandans are known for their incredible way of communicating. We want to really use that as a way to build.

Lastly, in our country in Uganda we would love to take a community approach and be able to work alongside other communities, not necessarily taking the model of what we've done with the village but taking the message of health, love, prosperity and education into communities, so that children living with HIV in those communities can grab onto something that will give them hope, instead of just waste away or be forgotten in the dark corners of society. We want to bring them out and change this story across the whole country and hopefully across Africa and into the world where death has been highly associated with HIV. We want to change that.

Emily: Have you always wanted to go to Africa and work with kids?