A New Hospital Will Change Everything. “If an African mom is saved, a whole home is saved…”

Over the past 12 years, the Sonrise Baby Home has saved the lives of more than 450 malnourished, sick, and abandoned babies. One example is a six-year old spitfire named Gabi, who was found abandoned in a bush in 2019. She was several months old, but was so weak and skinny that she was unable to cry. Today, Gabi is a thriving young kindergarten student that runs fast enough to take the soccer ball away from the boys.

The Sonrise orphanage group in Uganda is an amazing story. Starting in 2012, three former orphans (who had been raised themselves by an American missionary) decided to launch three orphanage homes, to care for babies, children, and rescued ‘street girls.’ The need is overwhelming, with babies abandoned or starved when their mothers die in childbirth. This happens often, especially in the rural Kayunga District where as many as six of every thousand mothers die in childbirth.

Damali Mirembe, the human dynamo that leads the Sonrise Baby Home, decided to attack the root cause of the problem by building a well-equipped maternity and baby hospital. Mirembe has an excellent track record: on her own she has built an organization that routinely saves the sickest children in the country and the Ugandan government will drive past the filthy government hospital to give the sickest cases to her.

The Sonrise organization is also unique in their approach: They aim for a self-sustaining model. Each orphanage home has its own farm to grow beans, corn, sweet potatoes, and raise goats, pigs, and cows. They fed themselves when funds dried up during the COVID pandemic. It’s a local Ugandan organization, led by the former Ugandan orphans, so they know what these children need to succeed. 

Faith of a Child Foundation is a USA-based nonprofit organization that has latched onto Sonrise to provide the money for major projects. Director Joe Madden comments that “By working directly with the construction team in Uganda, we can verify that every penny we send goes directly into bricks, concrete, or other building materials at the site.   This is so refreshing compared with working with large NGOs that siphon away money for overhead costs and salaries. The Foundation’s role is simply to raise the money and audit its spending… we rely on our local partners at Sonrise to make decisions about what is best for these mothers and babies. We don’t want to be the arrogant Americans that go over there and tell them what services to provide or what support an African orphan needs.”

“Uganda has good universities that train doctors and nurses fairly well, but the government hospitals have very poor facilities and no gloves, no bandages, and dirty conditions,” continues Madden. “Our aim is to kickstart this hospital and based on the local statistics, we believe that we can save multiple lives every week.”

Hospital construction has already begun, and with the current fundraising campaign the building will hopefully be constructed by February 2025.