The Local Charity helping children through a civil, crop failure and a pandemic

Saltergate-Children's-Home

For six years now, a Chesterfield-based charity has been running a children’s home in the African country of Ethiopia. Here, trustee Kevin Morley – whose wife has lost four family members killed in a civil war – explains how they are helping more children than ever before.

WITH war raging, crop failure and Covid-19 spreading, Ethiopia has more challenges than most at this time. Despite this – because of this? – Saltergate Children’s Home (SCH) has grown both in terms of the number of children we care for (now 64) and the support we receive from kind and loyal donors. Some of the children we have helped are now young adults who we have supported through secondary school and are now at university or in employment. Ethiopia is on the UK’s red list due to Covid-19. As such, our regular visits have been curtailed and the last time we were in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, was April 2019. However, we have daily contact by telephone and email with our volunteers and the children’s guardians – sometimes four or five times a day – and can confirm that the children are all healthy, happy and in safe hands…