U on Sunday Feature: The lost children

Publication date: 17 September 2011

September 17, 2011 5:50am

Kay DibbenThe Sunday Mail (Qld)

WHEN three young people decided to set up a charity to help orphans in Nepal, little did they know they'd also be saving lives and reuniting families from around the globe in Uganda.

Thirty-nine children - filthy, hungry, skinny - walk listlessly through the dirt yard of their Ugandan orphanage.

Their bellies are swollen from malnutrition, some showing signs of malaria. Most should be at school but their fees have gone unpaid.

An 18-month-old baby lies there, as yet unable to walk. He's crying, hungry.

Across the yard in the dirty, mosquito-plagued dormitory, another young girl is so sick she might not survive the night. There's no one helping her.

Hervey Bay's Forget Me Not charity workers Kate van Doore and Andrea Nave thought they'd seen the worst of a Ugandan orphanage they'd been asked to help fund when they visited it 18 months ago.

Then they witnessed lunch. Bowls of warm water were passed around, a little sugar dissolved in it. Nothing else.

"In the instant it took for me to survey the situation of these 39 precious children, in that moment between one beat of my heart to the drawing of my next breath into my lungs, I felt the magnitude of what this project entails," Kate says.

"If everyone thinks it's too big, and if everyone thinks I can't make a difference, these kids will starve and nobody will do anything. How can you turn away?"

They didn't. Forget Me Not began a relentless community drive to provide the children money for food, school fees and uniforms. And it worked.

But the story was to get much, much darker.

Sixteen months after that first trip, Kate found herself back in Uganda, involved in a dramatic rescue of the children. One of their charity workers uncovered corruption within the orphanage. Money was being stolen. There were children there who appeared to have false names. And many of them were not orphans.

***

Forget Me Not began as a simple idea to help some children - not in Uganda but in Nepal.

Three young people in their early 20s were sitting around a kitchen table in a share house in suburban Brisbane.

Hervey Bay swim instructor Lars Olsen, then 21, was relating his experiences of volunteering in Nepalese orphanages to his sister, Mietta, then 23, and her flatmate, Kate van Doore, then 24.

Lars told them that while in Nepal, he experienced the "defining moment" of his life: he discovered that board members from one of the orphanages were molesting young girls. He couldn't stay silent.

He exposed the abuse to the local media. And then he risked his life, rescuing and hiding a few of the orphans.

At that table in Brisbane, Mietta and Kate were appalled.

Kate recalls: "It was corruption, sexual abuse, selling the medical supplies, feeding the kids on watery dhal and having them all malnourished, then scraping off all the funds on the other side".

Then Lars explained what he wanted to do: "I want to start my own children's home in Nepal."

It would be called Forget Me Not Children's Home. Kate, a law student, dragged out her textbooks and they formed a plan.

They could not have foreseen the magnitude of what they were about to do. They were making a lifelong commitment to children on the other side of the world - this group of young Queenslanders just starting their own lives. There could be no turning back.

When he heard of the plans, Lars's worried father sat him down and asked: "What are you doing, boy?"

Lars's reply was swift. "Dad, this is it. I know what I'm doing."

His dad was convinced. He would be the first of many.

The trio chose Lars's home town of Hervey Bay, which then had a population of about 45,000, to start the charity.

The first public meeting to gauge interest in the idea was held in the lounge room of Lars's parents' home.

"We had our chairs set up with three at the front for us and another 10 or 12 chairs," Kate says.

"Then 40 to 50 people turned up and it was standing room only."

Six months later, Forget Me Not Children's Home was a fully registered charity. Lars's dream could take shape. But first, they needed money.

Hervey Bay locals are proud of Forget Me Not and of home-grown founder Lars, who was named Young Queenslander of the Year in 2007 and Queensland Young Australian of the Year in 2008.

The charity has raised about $1 million in five years, mainly from grassroots fundraising such as donations, sponsorships and community events.

"Forget Me Not is very well loved. The people in Hervey Bay have an ownership and that's been our springboard," says Kate.

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Lars, who looks more like the keen triathlete that he is than the CEO of an international charity, is a much-trusted local who has been called "inspirational" by Fraser Coast Mayor Mick Kruger.

"With what he has achieved over there, people can see the money is being spent the way it should be and they know he's very accountable," Kruger says.

Tanya Young, who sponsors a little girl in Nepal and works for annual charity ball sponsor Kingfisher Bay Resort on Fraser Island, says of Lars: "His passion and enthusiasm, the way he just went into it with his heart and soul, he creates a belief in himself and what he is doing".

When charity workers walk down the street in their charity T-shirts, they are often stopped by people who want to donate money or run a sausage sizzle fundraiser.

"We have a saying that these children are supported sausage by sausage," says charity worker Andrea Nave.

"People stop us in the street and give us handfuls of change."

Initially, the charity raised $6000 - enough to set up the home in Nepal.

By January 2006, the first six of 21 children were taken into the first Forget Me Not children's home.

"It really was a case of jumping off the edge and learning how to fly very fast with children's lives in our hands," Kate says.

"When we got those first six kids I did have some sleepless nights, thinking there are six kids on the other side of the world relying on us."

***

Fast forward to 2009.

Another charity worker had been witness to horrible conditions forced upon orphans, this time in Uganda. Jo Heath had been knocking down the doors of the big charities, pleading with them to help out the 39 orphans going hungry there.

Back in Hervey Bay, inspired by their own experiences, Kate and Lars opened their door to Jo.

They thought they might have a go at finding some local sponsors to help the Ugandan children.

But first, they had to see it for themselves.

On her first trip to Nepal in 2006, Kate had formed a special bond with Alisha, a troubled little girl who was the smallest and youngest child in the children's home.

Alisha, who calls her "Katy Aunty", was vastly different to the happy, secure children Kate had looked after in a Brisbane childcare centre while putting herself through law school.

"I spent a lot of time just holding Alisha. She was a very traumatised little girl at four years of age."

In Nepal, Kate and her partner, Andrea Nave, who works as the charity's projects manager, saw how children's lives could be turned around with love, sponsorship and commitment.

But nothing really prepared them for what they found in the children's home in Uganda on their first trip in January last year.

"When we got to the home the children really were in dire straits," Kate says.

"Several of them had malaria, including one little girl, Gifty. We didn't think she was going to survive.

"Little Abu, who was about 18 months old, couldn't walk and was just hungry all the time."

Children were being sent home from school because the school fees were not being paid.

"When it came time for lunch, to my horror I discovered them getting warm water and putting two teaspoons of sugar in it and that was lunch.

"And I thought no wonder the kids here are clearly malnourished and developmentally delayed."

Then they heard chilling stories of child sacrifice for body organs in witchcraft rituals in Uganda.

The children wrote them letters, telling of their troubles, too scared to talk openly about them.

-----

Just as they were leaving the east African country, one of the boys pressed a hand-written note into Andrea's hands.

He said he had to go out alone at night and fetch water because he was a bigger boy. Then came the words "child sacrificing".

"We sat in the car on the way to the airport crying and reading that note," Kate says.

Throughout their letters many of the kids wrote: "Don't relax. Pull up", their way of saying: "Don't give up on us". Forget Me Not took that as their motto in Uganda.

Kate and Andrea returned to Australia shocked, but with one thought: They could not abandon the children.

"Kate looked at me and we knew. You can't touch a child on the face and look into their eyes and walk away. You can't," says mother-of-two Andrea, 45.

Jo Heath was sent back to manage the orphanage's registration and she made sure that their sponsors' money was going to the children they supported. She watched their health steadily improve.

But acting on her gut instinct that something was not quite right after the home's first yearly audit, Jo commissioned another investigation.

Uncovering doctored receipts, skimming and fraud, she alerted authorities and called for Kate to immediately join her in Uganda. The Ugandan woman who had been running the home for nine years was arrested.

But by the time Kate arrived five days later, the woman had been released on bail. She'd gone back to the orphanage to cover her tracks. She moved many of the 26 children still there and told others to run away.

Kate says: "She'd told them: 'People will come to kidnap you. Those white people are ghosts'. The children were very scared."

It was then that Kate and Jo were handed a mud map, drawn by one of the orphans then safely in a boarding school. On it was a house the pair had not seen before.

They sent a local worker to check it out. Thirteen children were hidden there and had locked themselves inside, too scared to reveal themselves in case they were taken by the "white ghosts".

Gently, the worker persuaded them to open the door. The children were still in their school uniforms when they were put in a minibus and taken to Kate and Jo.

By the next morning, the children had calmed down and revealed how unhappy they had been at the orphanage.

But the shocks continued. They discovered that many of the children who had been told they were "orphans" really had loving families living in remote villages who had not seen their children for years.

The parents had sent them away to the children's home believing they would be well fed and educated and would be sent home for holidays.

It became Forget Me Not's mission to reunite those rescued children, aged from four to 13, with their families and support any who could not go home through a resettlement program.

But it was not easy. The woman who had run the orphanage had given them false names and used emotional blackmail to get them to lie about their backgrounds.

"The first three children went home within 48 hours to a grandma and an aunt," says Kate. "When one of the boys returned home, he'd lost his local dialect."

The boy discovered that his mother was in Kampala desperately trying to find him.

When two younger boys were returned to their mother she said: "Fantastic. I haven't seen these kids for years. They were supposed to come home in the holidays. But where are my other two?"

Kate, whose eyes light up when she talks about the children, admits she felt overwhelmed the night after the Ugandan rescue.

"It was the magnitude of what needed to be achieved, what the kids had been through, what they were going through. Then you just keep going."

***

After the Ugandan rescue, which so far has resulted in 19 children being returned to their families and six others being placed in permanent care, the sponsors were assured that their donations were all accounted for. And all their sponsors have stuck by them.

"People have said: 'Go get them. Give them hell'," said Kate. "Forget Me Not was born from Lars witnessing corruption and wanting to do something about it. This is what we are supposed to be doing."

The charity is now working towards opening an eco-village in Nepal, to support 60 vulnerable children.

Kate juggles her charity work with her fulltime job as a Griffith University law lecturer. Kate and Andrea tell their friends they have 62 children, including Andrea's teenage daughters and the children in Nepal and Uganda. The pair self-fund their own charity and holiday trips to Nepal.

"It's all-consuming. This is what we do," says Kate.

Newly married Lars, who has a baby daughter, says whenever life gets tough all he has to do is look at a photo of children when they first arrived at Forget Me Not's Nepal home looking malnourished and scared.

"Then I look at a recent picture and see their happy, healthy smiling faces, holding up a report card with an A+, and I know that what we do is a very special thing and one I wouldn't exchange for anything."

To find out more about donating to Forget Me Not or sponsoring a child visit forgetmenot.org.au