Mbambu and her husband Rév Emmanuel have been looking after children orphaned by conflict for the past 30 years. Semilki Trust has been a dependable partner with your support from its inception in 2010, taking up the baton from individuals who helped Compassion from the outset. Our financial gifts have paid for food, firewood, medical bills and construction and emergency reconstruction. Our money has been used to buy land for farming and has supported income generating projects.
The Compassion centre only accepts children who lost both parents, with the majority coming from the frontlines of east Congo’s complex conflicts where whole villages have been destroyed; stories that have mostly been too horrific for us to recount in our communications. It’s not an easy task looking after 80 growing children, but somehow the team manage to pull off a daily miracle of providing a nutritious diet, washing clothes, looking after the sickest children and getting them to school
Semiliki is supporting the Compassion team as they roll out more skills-for-independence, family reintegration and adoption. In 2025 we helped two adults move into the workplace; one with tools including a compressor and rent for him to set up a mechanics workshop and one with materials and rent to set up a beauty salon.
For younger childern we are supporting the acceleration of family reintegration and adoption. Over the years a number of children have been adopted within their wider family but it has been very difficult to find family in the context of severe insecurity in eastern DRC. Mbambu and Kasereka have been travelling by motorbike (provided by Semiliki) far and wide in North Kivu province to speak to family members and see if the family situation is safe and an appropriate setting for a child to be adopted into. They identified the wider families of 14 children and young adults. Compassion also encourages adoption by local families in and around Butembo.
Our hope, in discussion with the Compassion team, is for children to only stay as long as they need to to become heatlhy and well nourished, to feel loved and looked after, to be restored from trauma, and move back to wider family or be adopted with local families within a two year period. Since starting in 1996, Compassion has looked after 170 children. Seven children sadly died. Currently there are 70 children and 13 young adults staying in or near the centre. That’s 93 children who were reunited with their wider families, who were adopted or who are now adults living independently. Previously the International Committee of the Red Cross supported some family reunification of some of the children but there is no longer an ICRC office in Butembo, so this work has fallen onto the Compassion team as well as the wider adoption work they are doing. Many of the families have been in very dangerous militia-controlled areas.
Mbambu writes: “We would like to thank our Lord God Almighty, who is faithful to his promises, for answering the prayers of those of you who continue to intercede so that orphans may enjoy holistic well-being and become useful to themselves, society and God. We would like to express our gratitude for your ardent concern to support and assist us materially, morally and financially in order to advance this work, whose mission is to take care of orphans from the age of their arrival at the site until their reunification with the families from which their deceased parents came or until they are fostered/adopted.”
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