The Center will have water soon

The newly-delivered 1,000-gallon water tank dwarfs the Tembari kids who are taking shelter from the sun.


By ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ
A Friend of Tembari Children


FINALLY, after a long delay, the 1,000-gallon water tank for The Center’s water facility project was delivered by the supplier last week.

Installing a water facility is one of The Center’s major projects. The other one is electricity, which we expect to have very soon.

The water tank, alongside the needed attachments like pipes and more, has been provided by the RH Foundation – the charity arm of RH (PNG) Group.

As soon as RH Foundation learned of our difficulty of obtaining water for our day-to-day needs at The Center, it did not hesitate to shoulder the cost of the materials for a water facility.

We use water to cook the daily meals of our beneficiary children and clean the cooking utensils.

To do this, volunteer mothers would need several buckets of water which they have to collect from the settlement water tap some 200 meters away.

The settlement water facility is being run by a community association called the Oro Community Development Association (OCDA), which charges fees to users.

But the problem with this service is that OCDA decides when to let the water flow.

It does not tell the users like us as to when it would come so we could anticipate for it, and thus wait for it. It has no fixed schedule. So you really have to wait by the water tap the whole time, ready with your bucket, if you badly needed water.

Sometimes, water would come late in the night, thus keeping people awake the whole night while collecting water and hauling them off to their houses.

The same thing goes for our volunteer moms assigned to collect water for The Center.

Due to the difficulty in having water, our beneficiary children would usually skip washing hands before eating.

And they don’t drink water but instead, would just make do with cordial drink, prepared from water collected from the public faucet. And this is, most of the time, contaminated because it is collected in not-so-clean, uncovered buckets.

It is a common knowledge that anybody who had just meals should drink at least a glass of water because it is needed to digest the food taken.

Our children at The Center would skip drinking water – a clean one at that – after their meals. And it is a pity for them.

That’s why I tried my best to encourage The Water Company (TWC), a purified water provider, to donate to the children on a weekly basis at least six 19-liter containers of their water product.

I would collect this donation every Friday from TWC and bring it to The Center the next day when I do my especial cooking for the children. Then, I return the empty containers for refill.

It is only then that our children would have really iced and clean water. And they could easily consume a container-full in matter of 15 minutes. That’s how thirsty they are for drinking water.

Hopefully, this sad experience of our kids would end soon.

The facility will be put in place by ABC Builders, Filipino-Papua New Guinean company owned by Johnny Ala as its assistance to the Tembari Children’s Care (TCC).

It is being facilitated by Engr Joselito Buenaventua, a New Zealand-based construction engineer who is supervising a K170 million hotel project in Port Moresby owned by Holiday Inn POM.

The project involves two high-rise hotel suite buildings next to the existing Holiday Inn hotel building and is being handled by Canam Construction, a New Zealand-based company – Joe’s employer.

Yesterday, Joe took a quick break from the work site and drove up to The Center to supervise the unloading of used timber materials that we needed for some of our future projects.

The timber materials came from the compound of ABC Builders in Port Moresby.

Joe discovered the Tembari children through the blogsite www.tembari.blogspot.com while surfing the internet when he was still in New Zealand.

At that time, he was preparing to migrate to Port Moresby and one of his first agenda upon settling in this city was to meet the Tembari children and find out how he can help them.

Joe discussed with me and Hayward Sagembo, the Tembari Children Center (TCC) president, how he intends to install the water tank.

Joe told us that Johnny Ala, one of his hotel project subcontractors, is ready to help The Center with what it needs to complete the water facility, like plumbers, equipment and materials.

The good news after the first good news is that Johnny is also willing to help The Center with whatever improvements it needed to boost its facilities, according to Joe.

He said with a better facility, The Center could improve the services it provides to its beneficiary children.

Like having a stable source of water for drinking and more.

And the water facility would be his first project for The Center.

Cheers to that!

Engr Joe Buenaventura supervises the unloading of timber materials at the backyard of The Center. The delivery was made by the ABC Builders, a construction company in Port Moresby.

Joe sorts our timber materials that could be used to build tables and chairs for use at The Center.

Joe and Hayward Sagembo, president of Tembari Children Center, pose for a picture under the shade of a half-completed chicken house, a part of a planned livelihood project of The Center


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Measly funding support saddles community feeding programs

By ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ
A Friend of Tembari Children

AT A RECENT meeting of 14 carer-mothers who each receive a monthly grant of K400 from WeCare PNG for their respective feeding programs in their community, it became obvious that the Tembari children are well ahead of their counterparts.

Called by retired priest Fr John Glynn, who operates WeCare foundation, the meeting discussed how the 14 mothers had spent their K400 monthly grant on their respective facilities during the month of August.

Our own Penny Sagembo, the founder of the Tembari Children Care (TCC) day care and orphanage center, was among them.

There was one common grievance from the 14 mothers: The monthly K400 feeding grant was not enough to cover the food needs of their beneficiary children.


But Fr Glynn said his foundation does not have much funding for soup kitchens and that the carer facilities have to make do with what they are getting from WeCare.

The retired priest said the street children are a responsibility of the community where they belong and therefore should provide the assistance to bridge the funding gap.

Hearing this, the mothers were dismayed, saying Fr Glynn was asking for the moon, and accused him behind his back of allegedly “sitting on the money”.

Sometime in February, Fr Glynn emailed me to suggest that The Center “must give way to other carers who are in far worse circumstances than it is”.

In fact, Fr Glynn had advised Penny “to develop her own self-sustaining operation in the same way” that a carer in Morata was able to achieve.

Using a loan from WeCare, the Morata carer-mother was able to start off with a livelihood project that it is now giving sustainable profit, and enabling her to support their feeding program.

(With lack of electricity and water at The Center, any livelihood project, even the simplest one, would be impossible to start. In fact, we have one waiting to take off but cannot due to lack of electricity to run our sewing machines to make meri dresses and others.)

Because of the measly feeding assistance from WeCare, the said carer groups could only feed their children two or three times a week and the food being served is usually kaukau, sliced bread and cordial.

Many of them would only have a budget of K20 per day from the WeCare grant to feed more than 50 children.

WeCare PNG receives its funding from Digicel Foundation. This year, it received a substantial grant, which also went to pay for school fees of many schoolchildren looked after by carer groups in Port Moresby, according to Digicel Foundation chief exec Marina Vander Vlies.

This year, WeCare paid for the school fees of 42 Tembari schoolchildren who are enrolled in 11 schools in Port Moresby.

Likewise, it is supporting 14 community soup kitchens, including the Tembari Children’s Care day care-orphange center, with each one getting a monthly feeding assistance of K400 each.

However, with soaring food prices, each of the carer-facilities has to find ways to feed their wards with a budget of K20 a day.

The lack of fund for its feeding program was the same experience that The Center had until last February: our children were only being fed four times a week.

But they are able to get out of this rut, thanks to the continuing support from our benefactors, who put up stakes in the future of the Tembari children whose number has grown to 97 to date.

With the feeding consistency that we carry out at The Center, coupled with the quality of meals we serve them everyday, I believe that the health condition of our beneficiary children has improved a lot over the last seven months.

My next project is to get their individual weight and height and monitor it over the next three months. Have they gained weight? Have they gained height? That one I really have to find out.

Now suddenly, I got a new problem: To do this job, I need a weighing scale with height indicator, just like the one used at a health center.

Any donor of this item?

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Sweet prawn dish for Tembari children

Volunteer mothers cook rice in a makeshift drum-stove.

Volunteer mothers lift a newly cooked especial soup.


Engr Joe Buenaventura helps the kids get water from a water cooler.

Penny Sagembo, TCC co-founder, supervising the children’s hands washing before eating their lunch.

Kids sip their steaming hot soup before the main course of prawn and rice, cordial and milk.

Kids enjoy their special lunch of prawn dish and rice.

Preschoolers eat their lunch inside their classroom.

Kids trying to get their nth serving of the special soup.

Children try to retrieve some leftover soup from the pot.


By ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ
A Friend of Tembari Children


LAST Saturday was the second in a row in which the Tembari kids enjoyed a special dish cooked with prawn.

And according Thomas Kuo, regular donor of frozen prawn, this marine product is packed with protein which our children badly need.

Thomas is the general manager of High Energy Co, a Port Moresby-based fishing company and exporter of frozen marine products. He committed to supply us frozen fish on a regular basis.

He used to send frozen whole medium-sized mackerel which I would cook for the kids on Saturdays. But we had a sad experience with this.

One recent Saturday during lunch, three of our small kids choked on the tiny fish bones, up to the point that they vomited. And this alarmed us a bit. Used to eating tinned fish only, most of our very young kids did not know how to eat real fish – the one that Thomas sent.

I relayed to him about the incident and he promised to find a good substitute.

He came up with frozen prawn, also one of their export products, which I then cooked in some special ways.

The first time, and that was the previous Saturday, I cooked it in coconut milk, spices and pumpkin – ala-Filipino style.

It was a good one and healthful at that.

Yesterday, I cooked it with a lot of curry powder, oyster sauce, pasta tomato sauce, potatoes and carrots.

It was matched with a special chunky soup concoction of diced carrots, tomato pasta sauce, minced beef and special seasoning.

The 80 kids (out of the 97 in our roster) who came for lunch yesterday, were all delighted, having experienced a new flavor.

And of course, the soup. They tried to have their nth serving, but the 30 liters of soup that I prepared was dried up quite quickly. A big hit among them, indeed!

I made it a point to have soup because the kids have looked forward to having it every Saturday.

Thinking all about this, I realized that the Tembari children are very lucky.

This is because their diet has improved a lot since January when I started my special Saturday cooking them.

Before that, they used to have meals four times a week – Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. They were only having kaukau, sliced bread and cordial drink. In between, I did not know what they ate at home with their guardians.

Thanks to our generous benefactors, our children are now eating proper meals everyday, from Monday to Saturday. Their meals consist of rice, tinned fish and veggies, cordial drink and milk.

The Saturday lunch is quite special because it is being sponsored by individuals who pay for the ingredients. And I am the one cooking it this time.

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Sunday outreach program for the Tembari children

By ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ
A Friend of Tembari Children


WHEN Filipino expatriate Grace Delosa heard that a group of his friends was visiting the Tembari Children Center yesterday (Saturday) afternoon, she made sure that she came with them.

She said the birthday party at a friend’s place that was starting those hours could wait.

Grace immediately became interested in meeting the Tembari kids one of these days to create a special bonding with them.

The Center’s visitors were led by New Zealand-based Engr Joselito (Joe) Buenaventura, project site engineer at the hotel building construction project of Holiday Inn in Port Moresby.

Engr Joe and Cocoy Erbina, construction project manager of Filipino-Papua New Guinean-owned ABC Builders Co, and Grace came to The Center to find out what possible help they could offer on behalf of the Tembari children.

The two building experts wanted to build a new classroom for The Center’s 45 preschoolers and a concrete platform for its 1,000-gallon water tank and to do some more that have to do with construction.

And Grace has her own agenda for the Tembari kids – to start a Sunday school and a feeding program with help from her Filipino colleagues in Port Moresby that included Jovy Baltazar.

With the Sunday feeding program, The Center would now be feeding the children seven days a week! – from Monday to Sunday.

Grace and Jovy work as HR staff at Paradise Business Consultants with offices at the new Datec building complex at Gordon district.

“We can do a lot for the children on Sunday … we want to socialize with them and at the same time create a bonding with each one of them,” Grace said.

“It is one way for the children to learn how to deal with people other than their own races … it would help them develop a good personality …”

“On our part, it is an opportunity for us to do this community service at the settlement,” Grace said, referring to ATS Oro Settlement at Seven-Mile were The Center is located.

Back in her hometown in General Santos city, the home-base of RD Tuna Canners’ mother company in the Philippines, Grace had been involved in Sunday outreach programs.

It was something that developed in her simply because her own parents were also into it during those days when she was still in school.

“I carried it on and with help from my friends, we taught many deprived children many things that helped them became good citizens of our city,” she said.

One major project that her group’s Sunday outreach program launched in General Santos city was the handicraft project that first started as a Sunday hobby to keep the children out of the streets, which later developed into a livelihood project that has become sustainable even up to these days.

“I would like the same thing here at Tembari Center … we can do it because it is interesting to do and the kids would love doing it … who knows? … we might be able to produce something that could be marketable …?” Grace told me.

She said she and her friends will sit down to take up what could be applicable as far as the Tembari kids are concerned and launch it eventually.

“Sundays could be our home-time for family but we could make it more meaningful if we give them to the Tembari children.

“It’s also one way of knowing the Papua New Guinean culture in an intimate way,” she said.

Grace’s group would be the fourth from the Filipino community in Port Moresby that I know of being involved in feeding and outreach programs.

These feeding programs are held at Tokarara for the Tete children, Six-Mile (for the settlement children) and GK Village at Gerehu Stage 6.

But the first three would only do theirs once a month, due to time constraints, and therefore, the bonding with the children was not sustained and most of the time forgettable.

“It’s not a problem with us … we would like to devote a part of our weekend to the children,” she said.


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Kids displaying their flavored milk courtesy of SVS supermarket.

A kid enjoying his vanilla milk drink served after lunch on Saturday.

Children enjoying their prawn lunch on Saturday.

Wagi, the caretaker, mixing cordial drink with purified water.

A kid getting cool drink from the purified water dispenser.

Children playing inside their classroom after lunch.

Wagi leading the singing of Central song with volunteer mothers after lunch while the children sing along.

A volunteer mother painstakingly scrubbing the soot off the giant pot.

An abandoned dirty stove and a pot waiting to be cleansed.

Engr Joselito Buenaventura and ABC Builders solve The Center’s timber problem

This is the makeshift classroom built on the left wing of the CLC.

This side on the right wing of the CLC will be converted into a bigger classroom which would also double as audio-visual room where the children could watch video of children educational programming. It will also serve as the children’s dining hall.

By ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ
A Friend of Tembari Children

LAST WEEK, I was a bit concerned after I learned that it would cost us more than K1,000 to buy timber materials to build a new, makeshift classroom for our preschool.

The new makeshift classroom is intended to take the space on the right wing of one of our community learning centers (CLCs) fashioned out a junk container van.

On the left wing of the container van already sits a new makeshift classroom built of scrap timber materials which we bought in one of the timber yards outside of Port Moresby.

The planned new classroom would not only function as one but as audio visual room as well, where our preschoolers numbering 45 could watch educational children’s programs, from my favorite Dora to Sesame Street and Bananas In Pyjamas.

This space would also serve as The Center’s dining room.

With some imagination, the Digicel Foundation has been able to produce classrooms out of discarded containers and distributes them to communities across the country as part of its mother company’s (Digicel PNG) corporate plan to boost education in deprived rural communities across Papua New Guinea.

Each unit costs at least K15,000.

The Tembari Children Center (TCC), a day care and orphanage center, represented the community at ATS Oro Settlement at Seven Mile outside of Port Moresby after Digicel Foundation found it deserving to have two of these CLCs.

They are now benefiting 45 preschoolers who are orphans, abandoned, neglected and unfortunate by learning arithmetic and the alphabet with help from three volunteer teachers.

While two classes of 15 each hold their daily sessions inside the classrooms, the third batch does it under the mango tree next to the CLCs. Whenever it rained, this batch would be sent home, while the two other classes would proceed with their day’s activities.

When Filipino construction Engineer Joselito Buenaventura visited The Center yesterday afternoon, a Saturday, he immediately told me that my problem concerning the timber materials has already been solved.

“I will take care of that,” he told me as he assessed the space where the planned new classroom would materialize.

Joselito, or Joe, a longtime New Zealand resident, works as project site engineer with the Canam Construction Co of New Zealand.

Joe’s company won the K170 million-contract to build two buildings for the Holiday Inn in Port Moresby and he’s overseeing these two projects as project site engineer.

He told me that his client, Johnny Ala, owner of ABC Builders, will provide The Center the needed materials for the new classroom.

“I will draw the classroom plan myself,” Joe said.

Joe came to the village with Cocoy Erbina, ABC Builders construction/project manager, to see the place and to assess how to go about with the planned projects.

I would say yesterday was really a lucky day for The Center and its beneficiary children.

This is because ABC Builders has also agreed to build the concrete platform for our 5,000-liter storage tank and to install The Center’s water connection from the village main water pipe located nearby.

Cocoy told me his company has a lot of extra building materials from previous projects that are just sitting and wasting away at their compound.

“Might as well bring them here (The Center) to make them useful,” he said.

While these discarded materials would no longer have value for ABC Builders, they’re worth a thousand kina or more for us as we would really have to bleed to be able to bring them to our premises.

So from last week’s little setback arising from our inability to afford the cost of the timber materials, things suddenly shot up, went on high gear, not only with the coming of free timber materials but also with the needed labor and expertise to help us realize one of our most vital facilities for the Tembari Children – a new professionally-designed classroom.

You may be wondering how Engineer Joe learned of the Tembari Children Care center while he was in New Zealand with his family.

Weeks before he was to come to PNG for the Holiday Inn building project, Joe was at a loss on how to go about setting up a new home in Port Moresby.

With no contacts in Port Moresby to ask how it is to be a POM resident, he Google-searched for “Filipino, Papua New Guinea”. Immediately, my name came up along with several articles I wrote in the past, particular those I wrote under my online column “Letters from Port Moresby”.

Then, he encountered my blogsite for the Tembari Children – www.tembari.blogspot.com and learned a lot about our activities at The Center, including the many things that our children badly needed.

He emailed me after this, to say once he was able to migrate to Port Moresby in the next several weeks and set up home, one of his first agenda would be to visit The Center and meet our children.

And to see what things he can do to help them.

Yesterday, he came with all the good news for our children.

Jo had worked in several Southeast Asian countries doing projects for Canam Construction, and one of the things he did was to coordinate with local people through whom he carried out outreach programs for the unfortunate children during the duration of his stay in those countries.

In Port Moresby, he saw the Tembari children.

Immediately, he thought about his wife back in New Zealand, who would be joining him in Port Moresby very soon. Like Joe, his wife has a soft heart for the unfortunate children.

“My wife would be very pleased to serve your children, the way you are doing it right now for them,” Joe told me.


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The Tembari Kids, Marina and the Digicel Foundation

By ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ
A Friend of Tembari Children


ON Wednesday, the Tembari children received visitors from Digicel and Myanmar, whose coming was initiated by Digicel Foundation.

The Digicel executives from overseas units came with business executives from Myanmar who could be possibly looking at the operations of PNG’s No. 1 cell phone network.

I can assume that the Myanmar delegation would like to find out if Digicel could also come in to their country as a cell phone provider.

But the foundation’s CEO, Marina Van der Vlies, has always seen to it that their foreign guests would also have to see how the Digicel Foundation works around the country.

And the Tembari Center is one convenient place for them to see in Port Moresby, one place which is worthwhile to spend their time on.

But whatever it was, I will leave it that way.

The Digicel Foundation, since its founding, has been very active in promoting the cause of its beneficiaries around the country.

One of them is the Tembari Children Center (TCC) which was given last year two units of community learning centers (CLS) to boost its preschool program.

The CLCs are actually classrooms fashioned out of junk container vans. After being appropriately fitted out, a unit would easily cost K15,000.

The CLC classroom scheme is brilliant. It could easily be transferred to a friendly location should the landowners in the area where it has been installed decided to harass the foundation in their hope that they could rip it off it for money.

But as far as the CLCs at Tembari Center is concerned, their tenure is safe since the property where the facility operates is covered by a 99-year lease, in the name of the Tembari Children Care (TCC).

Thanks to the foundation, which is being actively fronted by Marina, The Center is able to provide early education to our 45 children, who are orphans, neglected, abandoned and unfortunate.

Last Wednesday’s visit was another red-letter day for The Center, which is right now experiencing a steady growth in terms of support from benefactors and in acquisition of basic facilities.

Maybe because of the fast-paced developments at the center, thus leaving the rest of Digicel CLCs around the country by miles, Marina finds it worthwhile to bring VIPs to Tembari Center once in a while for a quick look-see.

It appears to me now that The Center is gradually becoming a showcase for Digicel Foundation’s program to bring education to the grassroots.

The early training that The Center provides to its preschoolers through the three volunteer teachers is doing wonder in their disposition and spirits.

Our preschoolers, along with the rest of the 52 children under our care, are now finding sense in their lives.

And this is what The Center is all about.

In an email to me yesterday, Marina provided some more details of the foreign executives’ visit:

“Yes we had some visitors from Digicel and Myanmar to have a look at Digicel’s operations in PNG including the work of the Foundation.

“We showed them some different projects including the Community Learning Centre in Talai, the Womens Resource Centre in Kaugere and the mobile clinic the Digicel Foundation has funded in partnership with Foursquare church.

“They were impressed especially about the level of ownership the community has taken over their Community Resource Center and the fact that community members volunteer to teach the children, cook the food and are engaged in other CLC activities for the benefit of their community.

It is also great to see and hear that other corporates have come on board to help out and support the Tembari Children.

“The visit was really about sharing experiences and learning from each other.”

Oh yes! It was Marina who introduced me to the Tembari Children one Christmas day in 2009.

What ever happened after that between me and the children has become a beautiful, on-going story.

And I really love to tell you about it every week.


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Visitors from Digicel units overseas and from Myanmar listen to the Tembari preschoolers belting out a nursery song with guitar accompaniment from Wagi, the Center’s caretaker. – Digicelpic

Fresh supply of milk for Tembari kids

By ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ
A Friend of Tembari Children

A DAY after I posted a blog appealing for milk donation to the Tembari children, a popular supermarket in Port Moresby immediately responded with the good news.

The store, which is part of a supermarket chain across the country, said it will provide the children with 10 cartons of fresh milk (40 125ml packs) every month, starting September.

This is a big relief on our part in terms of meeting the children’s daily milk requirement.

Since there are at present 97 of them being looked after at The Center, the new milk supply would be good for four feeding days.

With milk as a major part in the daily diet of these kids, it has become our biggest expense every week since we started the milk program last March.

A modest grant from the British High Commission in Port Moresby has enabled us up to now to buy the children fresh milk at a cost of K1,200 a month, or an average of K300 a week. The weekly buying covers at least 79 one-liter packs, or 6.5 cartons (12.5 dozens).

The milk is consumed by our children every after meal, from Monday to Friday, with four kids sharing a one-liter pack.

On the other hand, the milk that we serve on Saturday is paid for by a top executive at RH Group, who also provides the children with a monthly supply of rice.

This is on top of another batch of rice being sent to The Center every month by a lady expatriate-executive. So in short, we are sufficient with rice.

My new appeal for milk donation has become quite urgent as the monthly aid from the British High Commission will come to an end towards the final week of October.

It could be recalled that last March, the British High Com held a fundraising fun-run and all the kina raised from it went towards the benefit of the Tembari children – in the form of milk funding.

Once it’s over, The Center would no longer be able to provide the children milk every day, except on Saturday, as the regular supply from the RH Group exec goes on.

A few days ago, I relayed my concern to Suzanne Laister, executive assistant to the British High Commissioner.

However, she told me not to worry as they are looking at ways to initiate new fund raisers so the daily milk drinking would not be interrupted. She hopes they could really raise new funds once more.

Meanwhile, even with the coming of fresh supply from the supermarket, I still have to look for more donors to fill the gap after its (supermarket) supply for the month has been consumed.

With 97 kids gulping this liquid food every day, every after dinner, the 10 cartons of milk from our friend supermarket could last only for four days.

So my job as donor-coordinator does not really end here; there are still 16 feeding days to work on.

Simply said, the supermarket is providing the children with a four-day supply of flavored milk, and the RH Group exec is also supplying milk good for four Saturdays of the month, for a total of eight milk-feeding days.

We have a total of 24 feeding days in a month – Monday to Saturday. Our donors’ combined milk supply covers eight (feeding days), thus leaving 16 days milkless.

So this time, this would be my goal: To find sponsors who would cover as many days as they could of the remaining 16 dry days.

I can understand why other facilities similar to the Tembari Children Care (TCC) center have been unable to sustain their respective daily feeding programs.

They just don’t have the sustained support from benefactors like the ones we have right now.

While they just wait for donors to find them, I go out of my way, marketing the future of the Tembari children to potential supporters, donors and to those who are looking for opportunities to help.

As a self-appointed donor-chaser for the Tembari children, I could feel some pride in being able to bring together generous supporters who believe in putting up stakes in the future of these children.

But chasing food donors appears to be an endless task for me.

You know why? The kids are growing everyday; they need food everyday to sustain their growing-up.

I have to encourage our expanding circle of supporters to keep the foodstuff flowing in while profusely thanking them for the willingness they have to bleed some more for the sake of our kids.

With sustained nutrition, there’s no reason for our children not to gain weight, grow tall and grow smart.

And what’s more, they are also gaining self-confidence, something they never had when they were in the streets as they desperately looked for food -- and home.

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