Basic Needs

For four years now, Sonrisa has been providing a warm and loving home-originally to 15 children. Two of these children have recently returned to relatives at their home.  The number of children is soon to increase and we will continue to take care of their basic, educational and medical needs. Over the past four years, we have increased our efforts towards encouraging their personal development, providing psychological support and imparting good values and aspirations as well as boosting their confidence, acknowledging that most of the children have gone through quite rough times at a tender age.

You can get regular updates and progress information about what we are doing here at Sonrisa from our newsletters.

We operate our organization with a very limited budget. The financial constraints appear to be an impeding factor. Despite our limited resources, we try nevertheless our best to create the best environment we can to help the children reach their full potential.

We provide for the children’s basic needs

Food

We continue to put a high priority on providing good nutritious food for the children, seeing this as vital during their growing period. Food expenses have risen considerably since we first developed this website and they are now NRs. 400 (~US$ 6) per day.

When we first wrote our website, we were concerned that the food we provided for the children was sometimes inadequate.  Thanks to the wonderful generosity and donations of so many of our supporters, we are now confident that the children are well nourished.  Their steady growth and the fact that they are much healthier than they were when they first arrived shows how much the good food has helped.  Now we have some regular donors who ensure that fresh fruit and milk is always available.  It is such a relief to us that we can count on regular fruit, milk and other extra food items.

Shelter

We live in a cheerful rented house in Chandole, which consists of four spacious bedrooms for the children, a big sitting room, a kitchen, an office, two bedrooms for the workers/volunteers, and a storeroom.

The orphanage is comfortably furnished within the capacity of our economic resources.   We are grateful to supporters who, over the past four years, have helped with carpets, curtains and places to sit comfortably.  The carpets are especially great in our cold Winter!  We have better storage, strong tables, chairs, a solar water heating system, and computers for the children  can use for getting in touch with volunteer who have been worked with us before, and we are looking forward to further strengthening the financial status of the organization so as to be able to complete the list of our most important needs.  Obviously, the functioning of many of these items depends on load shedding so we are also glad that we have our solar panels to help when the power is off.  As soon as we have the resources, we will purchase some more panels as the ones we have are insufficient.

The house has some outdoors space on the ground floor and on the first floor, where children can play and do gardening, although it is a bit small for the all the recreational activities we would like to carry out with them.

Ultimately, we would like to be able to build Sonrisa’s own home for the children.  There are a number of reasons for this including our desire that the children are in a cleaner more natural environment with better access to fresh and air and healthy water.  We would love to be able to grow more of our own food and to live in a less crowded environment.  To do this, we need to purchase some land that is still in Kathmandu Valley but a little away from the hustle and bustle, and then build our own building.    We have made some small scale efforts to move towards this goal but our fundraising is about to begin in seriously now!  We would love to hear from you if you are able to support us in this dream!

Clothing

Well, given the rate at which the children grow, this is one of our most regular expenses. Thank goodness for our supporters who continue to donate first and second-hand clothes, which, together with our initial budget, has allowed us to cover for the children clothes and school uniforms needed for this year. We hope to be able to maintain this situation despite the fact that the children are growing quickly and need new clothes regularly.  This is particularly an issue in our cold Winter. Past donations of warm, thick clothing have been wonderful for us and we hope this will continue.