Thank you for visiting this page – please take a moment to learn how you can make a difference in the life of a child, give him/her a much better future – and in the process enrich your own life.
The current situaton:
BACHO-K currently takes care of 312 orphans and vulnerable children and youth. Only about 120 of them have a sponsor. To allow us to keep all these children in school, we need your support. Can you help? It only takes $40 per month to make a difference in the life of a child. Many of these children are excellent students at school and also excel in extra-curricular activities.
History:
HIV/AIDS cases were first noticed at the fish landing site at Kansensero and Lukunyu in the 1980’s. Since then fish landing sites have continued to have a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS cases. Unfortunately, the same is true for Rwenshama.
Due to the many challenges to have proper access to information and resources on HIV awareness, and the difficulty for many people in Rwenshama to access medical facilities (due to distance and danger of traveling through the national park), many HIV-infected adults were not able to avail themselves of the life-saving HIV medications, and have already died of AIDS. To make matters worse, there are a lot of other confounding factors, such as re-marriage of abandoned/widowed/divorced women, absence of love and security in the families, family disputes, and unwanted pregnancy of trafficked/sexually exploited girls.
In addition to HIV/AIDS, many children have lost one or both parents due to the wildlife, in particular hippos, crocodiles, buffalos, lions and elephants that live in the area.
As a result, many orphans and other vulnerable children were left behind without care and support. These children got involved in small fish picking at the fishing site in order to feed themselves. Some got involved with pick-pocketing and participating in anti-social activities and unlawful activities. Therefore, BACHO decided early on to set up programs to provide care, support and protection not only in our own homes, but when many of their huts gradually got destroyed by storms, also in the orphan dormitories that were constructed in the past few years (click here to learn more).
Among these children and youth, there are ~ 50 who are living with HIV. BACHO provides them with many levels of support: nutritional supplements, education, access to life-saving antiretroviral medicines, clothing, housing, counseling and psychosocial support, and love.
Many of the youth are so motivated and have leadership positions in their school. BACHO involves these youth in many activities, including music/dance/drama via the Lake Edward Cultural Performers, and the Sahaya-BACHO Football Club. These youth excel, as many the cultural performers win many music/dance competions, and the football club recently won the western regional division.
How you help:
You can help! You can become a sponsor. As a sponsor, you will receive a profile of the child, and regular updates (such as a picture, letter, school marks, and sometimes a video).
You can support one or more orphans via the Sahaya International (USA) and Sahaya-Sawes (Belgium/Europe). Tax donations from these countries are tax-deductible in their respective countries.
How much does it cost?
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Basic sponsorship is $40 per month (or $480 per year).
The cost for most orphans from kindergarten through secondary school is on average $40 per month ($480 per year).
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Higher education:
The cost varies, so we can inform you of more details.
How to get started:
Contact Sahaya founder Koen Van Rompay at koen@sahaya.org. We have profiles of children still looking for support. Or if you feel it is too difficult to select one, we can select a child and assign to you. If instead of supporting one or more specific children, you prefer to just make a general donation towards this orphan support program so it can help many children at the same time, that is also always appreciated. You can make a donation via our donation page.
Below are some pictures and clips of some of these children and youth. To see more pictures, here are some galleries by Sahaya supporter Jon Sachs:
(click on individual picture to see enlarged version; most of these pictures with photo credit to J. Sachs)
To show you some examples of how skilled the youth in this program are, are some videos made by BACHO youth who are in the program, to express their gratitude on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of Sahaya International (November 2025). Note that for the poems, they wrote this all from the heart (without the use of AI).