Misikir Mosqes is sixteen years old and for the past ten years he has been living in the Abdii Borii children’s and youth hostel. His father brought him here at the age of six. His mother had abandoned the family a few months previously.
For Misikir it was the start of a new, unfamiliar ordered life. Together with a curriculum and minor duties he received shoes, T-shirts, pants and even a baseball cap. He learnt to brawl with others and assert himself, but he still remained the small, quiet boy he used to be. When he started school, he blossomed out. Today Misikir is not only the best of eighty-five students, he is also a thoroughly serious, conscientious sixteen-year-old who relieves his home mother of work and responsibility – a teenager in the role of the big brother. Or even of the little father.

Give an orphan a home: