Rehabilitation

The Transitional Rehabilitation Home (TRH) is part of a six-month to one-year multidisciplinary, rehabilitation program working to meet the basic needs of food, accommodation, education, medical care, counseling, emotional and spiritual nourishment of a child. It is our goal that within a year of living in transitional rehabilitation, the child can either be reconciled with his/her family or be found permanent housing through foster care or adoption. The Dwelling Places TRH is meant more as a conduit to rebuilding children spiritually, emotionally, and physically rather than an eventual destination for them.

Street children are often social outcasts; some of them became sexually active, alcoholics, thieves, and drug users at a very young age. Most of them don’t understand basic hygiene habits, and have never slept in a bed, or sat in a classroom. In the Transitional Rehabilitation Homes, we work towards enabling the children to regain their self-esteem and to groom responsible individuals who can take care of themselves and others.

The Rehabilitation Program is overseen by The Rehabilitation Program Manager who works with a team of 15 support staff. Our children’s home was approved by the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development in 2004.

Dwelling Places runs two homes – each of which can support up to 50 children. The boys’ home is very near the interim school, itself a critical part of the transitional rehabilitation program, and houses older boys under the care of Dwelling Places. The girls’ home houses older girls and toddlers less than 4 years old of both sexes. Each home is supervised by resident caretakers. Both homes are located in Mutundwe 1 Zone, Rubaga South Division, Kampala.

 The homes take in children aged 14 and below. Once the legal processes have been approved, we welcome each child into their home and provide them with basic needs - food, shelter, clothing and bedding, basic transitional education to help them adapt to society, basic life needs including health care and hygiene, moral and psycho-social support among others.

Individual Care Planning:

Each child that comes into our care has a unique story and need. At Dwelling Places, we have keen interest in the holistic development of our children which guides all our interventions to address the assessed needs. We adopted the Step-by-Step tool to guide this planning with focus on the five key dimensions:

• Emotional And Social Wellbeing
• Family
• Health And Hygiene
• Education
• Spiritual And Moral Values

The Interim School:

We run a tailor made education catch up program for all the children that we rescue from the streets. We have seen children that came through this program excelling academically and are now at University. The Interim School provides accelerated education which enables the children to comfortably settle into main-stream school where they can compete with other children from “normal” family backgrounds.

At the TRH, we also engage the children in empowerment programs, spiritual enrichment, counseling, talent development among others.