Todd Lorentz
Managing Director
One Child’s Village: A Global Orphans Foundation

I have always felt strongly about the issues surrounding poverty and the fact that such an advanced civilized age as ours would still see more than half the population of the planet living on less than $2 dollars a day. So it was without hesitation that I accepted an opportunity to travel to Kenya in April 2005 to participate in the 4th Annual International Conference on “Africa and Globalization for the Common Good: The Quest for Justice and Peace”. My hope was to deliver a message about the interdependence and interconnectedness of all of humanity, and the need to share the resources of the world more equitably. What I received, however, was an opportunity to bring life to that message in a very real and concrete way.

Our journey together as conference delegates included a trip to various locations within Kenya to engage with the local culture. One such excursion brought us to the doorstep of the Ananda Marga Orphanage where we got to see firsthand the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on the population. Visits to the slum areas of Kangaware and Kagemi – where locals manage to survive on less than $1 per day – brought home to me, in stark visuals, the reality of poverty for billions of people on this planet. The problem seemed too large for me to respond to in any meaningful way.

Our journey continued on to Kericho were we spent three days in presentations and meetings with delegates from around the world. But it was with one particular delegate, Charles Ouma Odour, that my most valuable conversation was to occur. Charles was a local pastor who worked fulltime as a teacher for a local orphanage in Nairobi. However, his ‘spare’ time was dedicated to helping a large group of orphans in villages of the Busia District of western Kenya. With the help of two other pastors, he had taken responsibility for a wide range of needs of children whose families were ravaged by the scourge of HIV/AIDS. As I spoke to Charles, I realized how basic and affordable the needs of the children were in comparison to western standards. (Monthly rent for a school accommodating 60 children is $80 CAD and each child receives two meals a day for just under $1 CAD, to name a couple examples.) I also realized that this was an opportunity for me to engage directly in issues of poverty that I was so accustomed to lecturing about. More than that, however, I realized the many blessings that I have received in my life being fortunate to have lived in the developed world and how easily that could multiply a hundredfold if I could share that with others in the developing world.

On my return to Canada, I discussed with many friends and colleagues ways we could help Charles and the orphans. Much of the work Charles does feeding and supporting the children is funded directly from his own wages. It became clear from our discussions that we needed to establish a self-sustaining centre to support the health, development and well-being of the children. We decided to inaugurate a foundation to collect funds toward the establishment of an orphanage and medical clinic for the children. In mid-November 2005, “One Child’s Village: A Global Orphans Foundation” came into existence for just this purpose. Immediately afterward, we applied to the federal government for charitable status and hope to receive the tax-deductible status by the end of July 2006.

The work in developing this charity has been challenging, yet the support we have received thus far has been incredible – bordering on miraculous. We have recently developed our website – www.OneChildsVillage.org – in hopes of spreading our message about the simple and accessible needs of the children in Kenya. We have already engaged in small projects with Charles, including the purchase of school uniforms that enabled several children to enter the public school system. More recently, we have begun focusing on generating funds for the development of a full orphanage and medical clinic. Members of the World Organization of Natural Medicine Practitioners (WONMP) have entered into an agreement with One Child’s Village to develop the medical clinic and donors are beginning to step forward with generous gifts of funds for the children’s new home and school. With matching grants, a seed amount of $25,000 CAD (about £12,000) can easily grow to well over $100,000, enabling us to break ground on a new orphanage almost immediately, and our all-volunteer organization ensures that almost the entire amount of every donation goes directly to the project.

The conference in Kenya turned out to be, for me, a valuable experience in both giving and receiving. Along with the opportunity to share ideas and viewpoints with interesting delegates from around the world, I was also given the prospect of working in a more tangible way with issues of poverty in Africa. We now have the vehicle and the means to deliver the resources of those more fortunate directly to those who have very little or even nothing at all. I have also developed many friendships along the way and built bridges across a vast ocean in forming an international community. The distance between our continents grows smaller with every step and I realize how interconnected our world really is; how much it is really only one interdependent village. It seems most appropriate to reflect on the well-known African proverb “it takes a whole village to raise a child.” If that is true, then any one child in the world is our responsibility and all of us together are that one child’s village.