Faith of a Child Foundation

Just over a dozen years ago, the Sonrise Baby Home in Uganda was started by a young woman named Damali Mirembe. She was one of many orphans raised by an American Vietnam War veteran on disability who had, years ago, moved to Uganda to help the orphaned children there. When they grew he put them through university and set them up with successful careers in the capital city Kampala. Mirembe was employed as a social worker but decided that she wanted to pay forward the kindness shown to her as an orphan by the American gentleman. She decided she would help orphans herself in a rural area of the country. 

“She started taking these young babies who were extremely malnourished into her home,” explained Joe Madden, who runs a Santa Ynez-based nonprofit. “Before she knew it, she had 36 babies in a one-bedroom house. Just imagine the chaos!” 

To help meet the need, Mirembe soon expanded her operation, and now Sonrise Baby Home comprises six different buildings where she helps to raise 75 babies whose parents have either perished, or abandoned these children. 

“She has saved almost 500 babies from certain death over the last 12 years,” Madden said. “Now there’s a school for the older kids, and it’s become a major enterprise.”

Madden became involved when he first visited back in 2019 and was stunned by the positive impact Mirembe and Sonrise had made on the community. 

“We thought we’d go help out for a week,” Madden said, “but when we saw what she was doing, it was just shocking compared to the kinds of charities that you get involved in here in the United States. I’ve done a lot of charity work with homeless shelters and rehabilitation centers here in California. But when we went to Africa and saw the kinds of needs that exist over there, it’s a whole different level. It’s an absolute matter of life and death.” 

Madden launched Faith of a Child Foundation as a way for American donors to make tax deductible donations to support the ministry. After years of helping out by providing life-saving baby formula and other services, Faith of a Child Foundation learned that Mirembe had bigger plans – strategies both for reducing the incidence of babies being orphaned in the first place, and for mitigating the maternal mortality rate in that part of Uganda, which is more than 25 times the rate in the U.S.

“There were all these stories of babies being dropped off on her doorstep because the mother died in childbirth and the father can’t raise the child on his own,” Madden explained. “Damali decided she wanted to go after the root cause and prevent those mothers from dying, which would also result in fewer orphans.”

The solution: Building a well-equipped maternity and baby hospital. 

“The Ugandan government is already bringing its sickest babies to her rather than one of the unsterile hospitals in the country,” Madden explained. “But they don’t provide any funding. Which is why we have our foundation. There’s absolutely no safety net for these kids in Uganda. If I don’t help them, nobody else in the world is going to help them. When we were there, it hit me pretty hard that this is God’s work, and I feel like it’s my job now to help take care of these kids.”

When the Giving List book was published last fall, construction beyond the basic foundation had yet to begin. Now, Madden happily reports, a new well has been dug to provide clean water for the community to reduce incidence of worms and typhoid, and the hospital’s second and third stories are well underway. The building itself is expected to be completed by summer. 

Faith of a Child Foundation is currently raising money for the medical equipment, and is also seeking health-care volunteers to travel with Madden and his wife to set up the hospital operations.

But this isn’t a case of Americans coming onto foreign soil and taking over with a top-down attitude. Sonrise and the hospital project are very much under local control, Madden said.

“What’s different is that the people in Uganda are actually in charge. Damali is the head of the project. The former Ugandan orphans are the ones who know what these children need to succeed. I’m just here in the United States helping to raise funds and coordinating with Stanford Hospital – who have the expertise on how to build their operating room for C-sections and get the right equipment. But it’s Ugandan local people making the decisions, Ugandan construction people building the hospital, and Ugandan doctors who will work there.”

What’s more, the American dollars Maddens helps raise go a lot further in the African country than they might here. There’s an exponential difference in what can be called bang for the buck.

“We’re going to have the three-story hospital built for about $600,000,” Madden said, adding for emphasis, “That’s not much more than it costs to do a bathroom remodel (in Montecito or Santa Ynez). And all the donations that we raise go directly to constructing the hospital, buying formula for those kids, supplying the computer lab, and adding animals to the farms where they raise their own food.”

Even so, Faith of a Child Foundation doesn’t plan on being needed to provide indefinite support. As it is, the Sonrise organization is already moving toward a self-sustaining model, with each orphanage home maintaining its own farm to grow beans, corn and sweet potatoes, and raise goats, pigs, and cows. It’s along those lines that Faith of a Child Foundation launched its other initiatives in Uganda, including trucking and motorcycle businesses funded by the nonprofit.

“What we’re trying to do is create a community that we hope will be self-sustaining,” Madden said. “They won’t need donations from anybody else to provide the hospital services because they’ll be making money with their businesses. After we help them build that up, hopefully I can step away because it’s all running by itself.”

Visit https://faithofachildfoundation.org for more information