A ten-year-old Ugandan street child named Ronald wept when he heard that a group of kind Bermudians was opening an orphanage in his city.

And when Christine Atcheson of Bermuda-based charity Restorers of Hope, took Ronald to get something to eat in a nearby cafe he smiled so much, he couldn?t quite get the food into his mouth.

?We met Ronald when we were walking around the streets of Kampala with a friend of ours, Rev. Milton Agaba. Milton and his wife are going to run our orphanage,? said Mrs. Atcheson who was in Uganda with her son Nathan, to oversee the renting of a building to be a new orphanage. ?This boy looked absolutely terrified. His legs were full of sores. He hadn?t eaten for days.?

Mrs. Atcheson and her colleagues had decided not to make any promises to the children they met on the street until the house was actually opened, but when she saw Ronald she just couldn?t help herself.

?He was just hurting so much,? Mrs. Atcheson said. ?He had been in the north where all the savagery had been going on. He escaped and came down to Kampala where an auntie lived. She had just been beating him, so he was living on the streets. We told him that there was going to be a house, and we hoped that he would be one of the children that came to the house. When we told him that he cried.?

They said goodbye to Ronald, but two days later, in a city of six million people, they found him again, sleeping on the floor of a train station.

?This time I said ?look, we have to feed this child. If you give him money then the older children will steal it?. We took him to a cafe. We caused quite a stir ? this white lady, black pastor and this little street kid.

?Ronald couldn?t stop smiling. In this photograph I have of him, he is trying to stop smiling so he can eat. I told him that Milton would keep coming back and bringing him some food. As soon as the house is ready, we would get him in.?

Rev. Agaba had the best intentions of going to see Ronald and taking food every day, but this plan didn?t work out. Instead, a better one emerged. Ronald is now living with the Pastor and will be one of the first children to live at the Kampala children?s home when it is opened.

Mrs. Atcheson has already used her charity Restorer?s of Hope to raise more than $10,000 in Bermuda to build a similar orphanage in Kenya called Hope House. That orphanage is now up and running. Now she intends to continue the project in Uganda where many children are made homeless through poverty, AIDS, and a war that has been going on in Northern Uganda for 18 years. Restorers of Hope have already picked out a building eight kilometres outside of Kampala. All that is left to do is refurbish it.

The house has six bedrooms and three bathrooms. Rev. Agaba and his family will live upstairs, and the children?s home will be downstairs.

?Initially, we are going to take on 20 children,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?We can take more than that, but I have given it a lot of thought and talked it over with the people who are helping me with the house. We all feel that we are all on a massive learning curve. The staff have to be trained. The children are coming from lives of being abandoned on the streets. They need very specialised care. They don?t just need someone feeding and clothing them although they desperately need that. The children will mainly be orphans to AIDS or just children who have been totally abandoned.?

There is enough land around the house for the children to keep chickens and goats, and perhaps a little vegetable garden to help the household be semi-self sustaining.

?These children will need a lot of trauma counselling and deep healing,? said Mrs. Atcheson.

?I have done some work in trauma counselling myself. The pastor?s wife is doing a two year course right now, and we are hoping to work with other people who have experience with this.?

Mrs. Atcheson said she will also be looking into what it would take for the children to be adopted out into a real family, perhaps even by Bermudians.

?There are people here in Bermuda who have already asked what would it take to adopt one of these children,? she said. ?I want to find out properly through a lawyer before I can answer that.?

She is currently in Bermuda She is currently in Bermuda again to raise money for the project, then she will return to Uganda in May to start setting up the house with furnishings.

?We need educational materials,? she said. ?Initially, we won?t be able to send them all out to school because that costs money. At first, we are going to try to do some basic home schooling ourselves, which shouldn?t be too difficult, because the children will be starting right from scratch. We will be very busy doing that. In May we need to do some training with the staff who will be cleaning the house. They will all be volunteers. We need basic hygiene training, because a lot of the health problems that you come across could really be avoided with basic hygiene, like bleach and washing hands.?

Because the children?s home will not discriminate against children with AIDS, the staff will have to be trained in how to take precautions.

?There are quite a few organisations that only take healthy children,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?As a Christian I can?t see that. How we can look at one child and say we are going to take you because you are not going to cost us as much money and live longer??

The new home will seem like a palace to most of the children, as many of them are currently living under trash bags in the streets.

?When we were going around the streets of Kampala, we were freaked out by the fact that there were vultures circling in the air over the city,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?They said there was a meat packing factory somewhere, but they weren?t just circling over this meat packing factory, they were circling the whole city. People die on the streets.?

The nearness of death for the street children, was brought home to Mrs. Atcheson one day when she was walking around the city.

?We parked the car in Kampala,? she said. ?As we were walking away from the car, I turned around and saw this little girl laying on the street. I said, ?oh my goodness?. It was nearly noon. It was 95 degrees outside and the sidewalk was hot. She had two older sisters nearby called Margaret and Agnes. They said her name was Night. They were just children themselves and they thought that she was sleeping.

?In actual fact, she was passed out from dehydration. I was telling her sisters, I need to get her up off the sidewalk and get her into the shade, and then they understood. I managed to get her to sit up. At first I had to pour the water in the side of her mouth. Then when she came to she was glugging the water down.? The girls told Mrs. Atcheson, through the help of an interpreter, that their mother sent them into the city every morning to beg.

Every morning they awoke at the crack of dawn and walked for many miles to get to Kampala with no food or water. Then they would spend all day begging. Then they would walk home. Then if they had a few coins to give to their mother, she would give them something to eat.

?When we go back we are going to try to find the girls again, and find out what their situation is,? said Mrs. Atcheson. ?There is no way they could have carried their sister back home. It was too far. She simply would have died if we hadn?t come along.?