Everyday Prisoners in Uganda living with HIV/AIDS are dying from opportunitistic infections and lack of care .Providing them with nutritional care and support is required to their save lives. 
Families of prisoners live in Deplorable situations , because the breadwinner has been put in prison,Parental imprisonment causes many problems for the family left behind. Your support can turn the tide for families of prisoners.Read moreWells of Hope Ministries as a Christian not for profit organisation , we are involved in outreach to people affected by adverse situations,and those who need help,Our key concern being people affected by crime,specifically Children of Prisoners, families of prisoners and prisoners in General.We are commissioned to respond to deeper needs of our society today by being agents of change and we help our beneficiaries to experience a transformation in their lives regardless of a person's religion,gender,or ethnicity.
Girl 9 years raped by Dad, Grandmother 70 years looks after 5 children
The biggest longing for children of prisoners is to meet their parents, but this is not the case with Mary 12 years . When she was 5 years, her father would repeatedly rape her elder sister who was 9 years then. When their dad attempted to rape her also, Mary ran out of the house and reported the matter to the neighbors. By then Mary’s mother had abandoned their home and remarried, so at that time they were staying with their father. When we met Mary yesterday, upon learning that it was her father who had sent us to trace for them, Mary began crying bitterly and together with her brother Aloysius 10, they ran away from us and hid. It took the intervention of the mother to convince them and told them that we were not taking them to meet their father but we wanted to offer them free education.
We were told that during the hearing of the matter, their dad threatened them and said that when he comes back home he will kill them, so they are so scared of him and they live with this fear every day. Mary’s dad will be released from prison on 20th October 2020.
Kony War : Born in a bush, and with a father in prison
Written by Francis Ssuubi
Gilbert 5 yearsThe Kony war,is seeming to have ended in northern Uganda but the scars still remain.One of the new children we have is Gilbert 5 years, whose father is one of the former warlords, who was granted amnesty by the government but is in prison on different charges not related to his participation in the massive killings in northern Uganda.
Pamela 28 ,Gilbert’s mother was abducted when she was 13 years,at that time Kony and his men would raid a village and take all the young girls(9-15years) that they would come across in the huts or in schools. They choose the young ones because they were easy to indoctrinate and would not remember their way back home.
The girls would walk long distance to unkown places in the bush away from their homes into South Sudan or DR Congo .When they would get to the bush, they would be aligned with blouses removed,breasts exposed and the warlords would pick wives from the captives. Each commander would select 20 girls and would take them away to a secret place, and would have sexual intercourse with each of them. This was the second step of the wife selection process, from the 20 he would then choose the ones he thinks have sexually appeased him. And the rest would either be given a gun to fight or would be killed. A majority were never allowed to live.
Understanding Mental Health in Children of Prisoners.
By Francis Ssuubi
When a parent is arrested in the presence of a child, it traumatizes the child and later may lead to a mental disorder, and in Uganda the arrests are usually violent. For a child, this is disastrous because a child looks at his father or mother as a hero, an anchor, the strongest dependable person, and now seeing your hero being treated like that is so disturbing to the child. Other causes of mental disorders in children of prisoners include growing up in homes where there is violence (fights, beatings and abuses), sexual abuse, child labor, physical abuse,poverty, and when they take long without seeing their parents they worry a lot. All this can lead to a serious conflict in the child’s mind.
Children paying the price for Their Parents’ Crimes:
Children Do Hard Time for Their Parents’ Crimes:
Very often, children of prisoners suffer the impact of their parents' imprisonment; they pay daily for the price of their parents’ prison term. Someone said that the children serve 6 times t
heir parents’ term in prison. Their parents only suffer denial of their liberty and other pains that go with it. A man in Uganda’s prison is assured of at least one meal a day, but his/her child is not sure whether he/she will get what to eat, many times the children have to work for the food. But the question will always be, what crime did they commit?
This week we have received 20 new children of the 45 that we traced recently, one of the new girls Juliet 10 years, was defiled when she was eight years by her uncle, and the family members decided to conceal the matter and she was told never to tell anyone.
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Children in Crisis
Written by Francis Ssuubi
During the last two weeks I have been travelling in different parts of Uganda, tracing children of prisoners, one thing that I have observed is that children in Uganda ,even those whose parents are not in prison, are in a great un describable crisis, and if nothing is done, the future of this country is bleak, raising up a generation that has been dented by poverty , and disease. With 50% of Uganda’s population being children, we have an uphill task to make the future bright for this nation.
Father of two children found in a prison after 10 years
“When He left in the morning for work, I was so sure he would return as normally as it had always been, but that day He never returned, we hoped he would return the next day but he did not, days turned into months and months into years.” That is how Sarah 28 years a mother of 4 children recounts, the disappearance of the father of her first and second born.
She goes on to say ,”Exactly 10 years later, one of my relatives called me and told me that the father of my first two children had been found and that he was in prison, a week later He sent instructions to me to contact an organization called Wells of Hope, which was to help with the children’s education.
When I visited him, he told me that he had been arrested along with others whom they suspected to have been involved in a robbery which led to the death of two people, and he has since been in prison, with no hope of being released since he is on death row.
PRAISE THE LORD
MY NAME IS MIREMBE PENINAH am 12 YRS ,I AM IN PRIMARY SIX AT WELLS OF HOPE ACADEMY My best dish is smashed chicken and my best colour is red because it is like the blood of God.
Before I came to Wells of Hope, life was not easy, I was staying with my Aunt in Ntinda (Kampala) and she was the one paying my school fees at Town View nursery and primary school .
Whenever I was at school my friends would talk about their parents that is , Daddy and mummy but I would only talk about aunt and a uncle ,sometimes I would be chased away from school because of school fees and life was really hard ,for it was not easy and I would wonder if really I had father and a mother in life .
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