From Evictee to Landlady!

Mary Syombua, now the proud owner of her own house!How did she do this?

Mary Syombua, 40, has lived in Kibera since 1993. For years she struggled to support the five children in her care by selling vegetables. When Mary joined Village of Love in 2011, she was in debt. She had borrowed from another micro-loan enterprise that charged interest, and the payments simply ate too far into her business profits for the loan to be anything more than a burden to her. Sometimes she was thrown out of her home for not being able to pay her rent.

This was not someone one would expect to become the Village of Love’s first home owner!

However, the personal mentoring and care she received through Village of Love has made all the difference. Volunteers helped her to balance her payments so that she has been able to repay her former micro- loan as well as several Village of Love loans. she has been able to increase her stock and add another item, sweet potatoes.

Through careful saving and management of her resources, Mary has been able to purchase the two small rooms she lives in, so that she is now living rent free! This is huge in terms of freeing up cash for nutritious food and school supplies and fees. Not content with simply saving rent each month, Mary has seized the opportunity to acquire another room for herself and her children to live in so that she can rent out the two rooms that she owns. A smart woman!

An excellent role model, Mary acts as a peer educator for Village of Love, providing advice and education to other women in the clusters and at their Thursday meetings. Sometimes she is even called on to act as a peer educator for other organisations such as the Salvation Army. a strong advocate for orphaned children, she reaches out to other families in the community to take in children without parents.

Mary, like so many orphan caregivers in the Village of Love is a wonderfully capable woman, who simply needed a hand up! It is a privilege to have been able to provide this.