Love SHACK Kenya: About Love SHACK

Vulnerable Children

The primary focus of Love Shack is to send destitute & orphaned Kenyan children to school and hospital. We currently do this through child sponsorship and small-scale fundraising. We have provided funds for life saving surgery and enabled a number of children to live their dream of attending higher education through to university level.

Although we do assist some children in rural areas the majority of the students we support live in urban slums. In order to understand the real needs of the community the Founder of Love Shack, Karen Ward-Kavita, lived in a slum herself for two years. It is this grassroots understanding of poverty that enables Love Shack to serve in a way that meets each child’s individual needs. We work closely with each family and know each child personally.

A typical home in a slum is one room made of a wooden frame walled with iron sheets. Each slum comprises of hundreds of cramped compounds and each compound can house in the region of 20 families. The narrow paths that weave around the slums are strewn with litter and there is little in the way of sanitation. When walking through a slum it is not unusual to have to leap a few open streams of sewage in order to continue your journey. Each compound, if you are lucky, has a pit latrine that can be shared by more than 100 people. Baths are taken by carrying a basin of water to a small hut, that’s assuming you can afford to buy the water from a tap in the street. Most families cook on a single hob wood or charcoal stove. Few families have electricity. Through education we hope to lift children out of this horror and into a brighter future.

At Love Shack we pride ourselves on low administration costs to ensure that all donations really do touch the lives of the children for whom they are intended. Everyone that works for Love Shack is either a volunteer, or they are funded by a sponsor that elected to assist a worker instead of a child.

In the near future we hope to build a boarding school for orphaned children. Although Love Shack does not wish to unnecessarily institutionalise children we do need to make realistic provisions for the children in the communities in which we work. Many children live with elderly or sick guardians. It is hoped that our boarding school will provide a loving home for when the time comes than these children are left without anyone to care for them.