It is with HUGE excitement that we are launching the new branding and website for Rafiki Mwema.
What is new about it is just about everything! Not only do we have new branding by our in house volunteer designer Drawn Upon and a fab new site, designed and built by Castle Design and Reindeer Riot but it launches the most exciting phase of our charity.
Up until now we have had Rafiki Mwema which is where we promote the need for support for our very vulnerable young girls. What you may not know is that we also have a boys charity, Rafiki Familia, where we support young princes who have lived and survived the horror of the streets.
Well not anymore! As of this moment our two projects have combined to bring you our NEW Rafiki Mwema.
We are so thrilled to support both boys and girls, princes and princesses, to help repair the horrific traumas they have all experienced. All our Rafiki Family will access therapeutic support, therapeutic parenting and therapeutic schooling. Together as one amazing family we will move forwards to help rebuild their shattered lives.
It is easy to see the needs of our baby girls. They are the survivors of the most unimaginable crimes. The rape of a child. We know they need us. We know we need to help them.
But what of our boys. The faceless victims of unspeakable abuse and torture. Surviving beatings, burning and sexual abuse on a scale to huge to imagine and then to turn to the streets as tiny children, because they are safer there than in their own homes. How come they are seen as ‘street boys’ and not abused children. Why does the world ignore their story and look away from their needs. We need to stop them from moving from abused to abuser.
Why are we pulling it all together? There is a big picture behind every abuse that happens and we are all about the bigger picture. We don’t want to work only with the girls, who are with us as the product of abuse, but also with our boys who have lived tougher lives than you could ever imagine. We want to help them to know they are loveable and wanted members of their community, rather than human vermin that are seen to infect and pollute the very streets they live on to survive.
By doing that we will help them to love and respect themselves and their Rafiki sisters and grow into the loving kind men they have the potential to be. They will be the very husbands and fathers that love and protect their partners and children and break the cycle of abuse that they have been subjected to.
Rafiki Mwema – Loyal Friend – you are THE most loyal friend to our children, to our family and to their future. By bringing our Rafiki families together we hope you will continue to share and be part of their lives. To be the friends they need to survive the rapes and tortures they have experienced and to know that YOU care enough about them for them to feel positive about their own futures. To walk alongside their journeys of survival. To hold the hand of every frightened and damaged girl or boy, and to know you are making them the strong Kings and Queens of the future.
Please get yourselves over to www.rafikimwema.com and check out the new website and take pride in everything you do to change the lives of our children
Asante kutoka chini ya mioyo yetu – Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Anne-Marie, Sarah and the entire Rafiki Mwema Team.