| History |
After founding Nsambya Hospital in 1903, Mother Mary Kevin, an Irish Missionary sister, was faced with the problem of what to do
with those who came for treatment but then had nowhere to go afterwards, those with debilitating diseases who were rejected
and stigmatized in their communities, the elderly who had no one to care for them, and orphans. After starting a hospital at
Nkokonjeru in 1926; she built the first hut close by to house a homeless patient who had been discharged. From such humble
beginnings and trusting in Divine Providence, Mother Kevin gradually extended the Home to accommodate more people.
The Little Sisters of Saint Francis of Assisi in Africa, a Congregation of native Ugandan, Kenyan, and Tanzanian sisters founded by
Mother Mary Kevin, continue to carry out her mission of love, education, and social justice throughout East Africa in hospitals,
schools, orphanages, refugee camps, as well as in Providence Home. During the 1980s, in collaboration with the Leonard
Cheshire Foundation and later Liliane Fonds, the focus of the home began to shift from merely caring for the elderly, orphans, and
people with disabilities to empowering them. This took the form of providing physical rehabilitation services, wheelchairs, and other
mobility appliances for people with disabilities, primary, secondary, and tertiary tuition for children and young people able to attend
school, medication and treatment for epileptics, and vocational training to provide training in shoemaking, tailoring, food service
and nutrition, handcrafts, agriculture, English literacy and mathematics for the disabled.
In the late 1990s, the vocational training program took a large step forward with the building of a bakery in partnership with Bake
for Life. The purpose of the bakery is to teach people with physical disabilities how to own and operate a baking operation. This is
the first of four such bakeries throughout Uganda which have provided training and employment to many people with disabilities, as
well as showing the surrounding community the expertise that people with disabilities can have in performing a complicated craft
such as baking and operating large scale operations.
During the last few years, Providence Home has taken on many additional tasks. The severity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Uganda
has led to an increase in the number of orphans at the Home. The Home has also reached out to the surrounding community to
help epileptics and people with disabilities through a Community Based Rehabilitation program (CBR). The community volunteers
who work with the Community Based Rehabilitation program head out on rutted, washed out roads to the surrounding villages to
identify those needing assistance and bring them in to Community Rehabilitation Days. The people are then given advice about
rehabilitation possibilities. There are also periodic clinics where doctors come and diagnose illnesses and help to provide
treatment. Through collaboration with Uganda Children’s Trust the home is also providing free eyeglasses to those who need them
in the surrounding community. Providence Home is constantly growing and preparing new programs in the attempt to fulfill the
Franciscan charisma of transforming the world by loving and empowering those neglected by the society.
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