Slaying Monsters in Africa — Kathy Headlee and Mothers without Borders
By Rebecca Birkin

Many parents have been startled from sleep by a frightened child standing near. We return them to bed with the promise that monsters don’t exist. What about the children who live where monsters are real? In Northern Uganda, children can’t sleep in their own beds for fear of being kidnapped. Thousands of Zambian orphans face figurative monsters of loneliness and starvation. And we don’t need to travel beyond our own borders to see young people in need. How do we help without feeling overwhelmed?

In the midst of a crowd, Kathy Headlee stands out. This is due not only to her fair-haired contrast to the dark curls of the youth around her, but because she makes the effort to help them. In classes at BYU Education Week and an interview, she spoke of her experiences. On one Sunday, she sits circled by orphaned Zambian children, their faces shining as they sing, “Heavenly Father, Are You Really There?” [i] She devotes her love to the orphans, taking time to reassure that they have a Heavenly Father who cares. Her dedication shines in the honored title some of the orphans give her — Mom.

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Kathy Headlee with some of her children.

The following week, Kathy stands in a Northern Uganda rehabilitation center. Many of the rescued children here, former slave soldiers, have lost limbs to cheap bullets or shrapnel. One boy asks, “Now that you’ve come and seen our suffering, did you just come to take pictures or are you going to do something to help us?” In a world where many turn away, Kathy Headlee asked Education Week attendees to look into the faces of those who need us. She says everyone can and must do something to help, however small our part. When we encounter suffering, she says the key is to ask, “What has this to do with me?” The answer will be different for each of us.

For Kathy Headlee, the desire to help others has always been with her. After seeing Romanian orphans on television in the early 1990’s, Kathy organized groups to help. They did everything from rebuilding beds and parts of buildings to playing with and giving care to the children. Before long the dramatic needs of African orphans spurred her efforts there. She soon founded a non-profit organization to carry on the work.

The Zambian children who sang to Kathy that Sunday wore T-shirts proclaiming the name of the organization, Mothers without Borders (MWB.) They are a small sample of the many children she has helped in Zambia, a country she estimates holds an orphan population of one million.

Kathy visits Africa three or four times a year, and there works to identify the needs of small communities with large orphan populations. Mothers Without Borders looks for ways to assist local communities to meet their own orphan needs. Some communities need school supplies, others a room to house the school now being held under a tree. Others need vocational skills, primarily for the women, and training in small family gardens to help with nutritional needs. Mothers Without Borders hires and trains local people to do the ongoing work, thus also providing needed jobs in a country where the unemployment rate is 80%. Many of the people involved in this effort are local Zambian members of the Church, with whom Kathy works closely.

Sometimes local communities cannot meet all the needs of these orphans. Kathy Headlee says, “There are thousands and thousands of orphans in this category.” For these cases, MWB is working on another way to help.

The Children’s Village is presently a model project caring for fifteen children. They live on a farm outside Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city, in two group homes. In the first home live George and Faith Mushipi, an LDS couple with children of their own. With the assistance of another couple, who live in the smaller home, they raise these orphans as family. The children will stay until they are grown.

The Village also provides vocational training for surrounding communities. Vocational classes include block-making (for construction), carpentry, tailoring, and will soon expand to include agricultural training. Continuing these efforts, Mothers Without Borders has bought 55 acres of land, and is presently building more group homes and vocational training buildings. “The ideal,” Kathy says, “is to keep these children in their communities. But for those who can’t, this village will provide a good living environment.”

This is only one of the many ways Mothers without Borders seeks to heal the hearts of orphans hungry not only for food, but for recognition and a chance in life. In Lusaka, for example, the Fountain of Hope Drop-In Center for Street Children serves approximately 1,000 meals a day. This dining hall/kitchen and clinic also supplies clothing, soap, and hygiene supplies. Educational supplies are also provided, essential in cases where children may be denied school opportunities because they lack simple items like shoes and a pencil.

The Mothers without Borders philosophy, says Kathy, is to “teach a man to fish,” or better, to teach a woman to sew. Rather than simply giving shoes that will wear out, they prefer to emphasize efforts like buying a village sewing machine and providing tailoring lessons. Then the village women can afford to buy the next pair of shoes. She says that as LDS people look for ways they can help, they are very generous in giving goods. Sometimes also, she says, we need to realize that an amount of money too small too be missed by most U.S. budgets — equal to one family meal at a restaurant — could do a great deal to help African children in need.

Although there are always more ways to help, Kathy has seen progress in Zambia. The success of Mothers Without Borders and the local LDS people there made Kathy Headlee’s visit to Northern Uganda devastating by contrast. A young Northern Ugandan doctor, Fred Oola, contacted Kathy and asked her to visit. She traveled many hours on a hot, pungent bus packed with chickens, pigs and people. Near the end of her journey she looked down a road bordered by lush fields and saw a village of thatch-roofed huts. From a distance, it looked idyllic. Then she stepped onto the dirt of the refugee camp and saw nothing ideal.

Caught in the middle of the civil war between Uganda and the cult-led Lord’s Rebel Army [ii] , 1.6 million people have been displaced from fertile farmland to crowded camps. Kathy described the living conditions as “worse than the slums of India.” These people have lived in crowded eight-foot huts, without water or sanitation, for more than ten years. This is a famine, as she put it, “in the face of fertile ground.” Unlike some drought-burdened countries, these Northern Ugandans are forced to rely on foreign food donations because the government considers it too dangerous for them to farm.

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These latrines are the closest many people have to indoor plumbing.

In this camp of 70,000 there is never enough water or food — nothing left to clean the remains of diarrhea that speaks of cholera and the too-distant row of shacks that act as toilets. In this photo, the children cluster around a cooking pot, scraping at the crusted bit of food discovered at the bottom. Their friends look on, hoping for a leftover crumb. Little bellies swell with malnutrition. Then the night comes, and with it, the monsters.

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Hungry children look everywhere to find small bits of food.

The real horror of these camps is that, as Kathy Headlee puts it, the people are now “ducks in a barrel” for the rebel soldiers. The L.R.A. sets fire to one thatched roof. The others are close enough to catch fire. In the confusion, the rebel soldiers stalk their prey — children as young as five — to be soldiers and slaves. When captured, the young boys are forced to kill, sometimes family members. Girls become ‘wives’ for the soldiers, bearing children in battlefields.

To avoid capture, children leave their homes before nightfall. They walk up to ten miles before they reach the safety of the cities. Lucky ones spread their straw mat in huge tents that hold up to 500. Others sleep outside police stations, on verandas or on the grounds of hospitals. Early the next morning, they return home, stomachs rumbling, but safe. Most have done this all their lives, never knowing the feeling of a warm bed in a secure home.

“After seeing the situation in Northern Uganda,” Kathy Headlee says, “I felt hopeless for the first time in my life. I came home and could barely function for weeks.” Then she began to realize the Lord’s hand is in this country too. Taking to heart her own philosophy, she realized that even if she began with small efforts, she could do something.

At this time, continuing violence prevents Mothers Without Borders from delivering food or supplies to Northern Uganda. However, their goal is to provide long-term assistance. Mothers Without Borders is instituting programs to feed and educate the children born in captivity, and to assist their mothers (former child slaves to the rebel soldiers) to support themselves.

Mothers Without Borders has begun to partner with Latin Balle Pee, (The Child is Innocent ) [iii] to provide talent and need-bases scholarships for Northern children to attend safe schools in Southern Uganda. At present, MWB sponsors seven children in boarding schools. They will soon have ten, and would like to increase the number of students to 100.

As Kathy talked with these seven bright students, she found they all wanted to be doctors or nurses. Galdino lived with his family in a camp. He was unable to attend secondary school because it was unsafe to leave the camps and his family could not afford the fees. He is now eighteen, attending ninth grade in a boarding school. He hopes to be a doctor. Southern Uganda is very prosperous and developed, and he could make a good living here. Kathy asked him, “Do you plan to stay in Southern Uganda?”

Galdino answered, “No, I want to go back and help my people.” All of the children Mothers Without Borders has helped to put in boarding schools plan to go back and help in Northern Uganda.

Kathy appreciates these children’s goal to help others. At Education Week, she urged her audience to have a similar desire. “Look the needy and homeless in the eye, even if that’s all you do — let them know you’re concerned.”

When interviewing a street child in Zambia, Kathy asked, “What is the hardest thing about being a street child?” His answer — not hunger or poverty, but, “The hardest thing is that we are invisible.”

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An untreated hernia and signs of starvation as exhibited by this young boy are not uncommon.

Mothers Without Borders is made up of many good people, LDS and otherwise, who make the effort to see these ‘invisible’ children. When faced with humanitarian needs in our communities or in the world, Kathy encourages us to pray and ask the Lord, “What has this to do with me?” Then listen to the answer.

Kathy’s suggested ways to help:

• Pray earnestly and specifically for those who suffer.

• Serve a mission or support the world missionary fund.

• Listen and follow personal promptings for how you can use your skills and talents to help others.

• Call your US Senate and Congressional representative and ask, “What are you doing to end the suffering of the children in Northern Uganda?”

• When finances permit, donate to the LDS Humanitarian Fund and other worthy causes,

• Read Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk, “A Handful of Meal and A Little Oil.” “I know we can each do something, however small that act may seem to be. We can pay an honest tithe and give our fast and free-will offerings … And we can watch for other ways to help. To worthy causes and needy people, we can give … We can share the loaves we have and trust God that the cruse of oil will not fail.” [iv]

To learn more about Mothers Without Borders, or to find out how you can help,

visit their website at www.motherswithoutborders.org.