RLG’S “Asongtaba” To Adopt Orphans’ Home In Bolga

A donor making appearance for the first time at the God’s Love Orphanage has dropped a loud hint to adopt the home itself. 

The home, one of the least donor-remembered in the Upper East Region, has been a lonely ‘orphan’ surviving on classroom salaries earned by its owner, a young couple, to feed inmates, pay nannies and defray utility bills. 

Asongtaba Staff

It was established by the couple (Felix and Mary Akampoi) in 2002 exclusively for children born to mentally ill parents, after Mary had seen a mentally retarded mother hit the head of her child against a rock, killing the toddler in cold blood.

The couple taps a monthly aid from another couple in the United Kingdom, Nick and Michel Cousin, but the support has been a drop in an ocean of needs. One of the inmates, a 3-month-old baby, died on the first day of March, this year. 

Moved by the couple’s struggles for the orphans and its peculiar focus on kids born to mentally ill parents, the Asongtaba Cottage Industry and Exchange Programme (ACI&EP), a subsidiary of rLG Communications Limited, announced its intent to adopt the home as “Asongtaba Orphanage”. 

The Business Development Manager for ACI&EP, Mr. Faisal Webre Keliou, made it known when the company toured the home, bringing along for the inmates bags of rice, gallons of cooking oil, confectioneries, toiletries and stationery reportedly worth Gh¢7,000.   

The ACI&EP Management, said Mr. Keliou, would first have a meeting to decide when the home would be renamed. He lauded the couple’s passion for children from such background as well as their determination to see them reach the platform as their privileged contemporaries. He also urged everyone to show love to the inmates “just as we [ACI&EP] have brought back what we took from society.”

“It is an amazing thing to have a company from within Ghana to adopt an orphanage. It is only common with foreign companies from developed countries to do so. It is a booster,” said Mr. Felix Akampoi, co-founder of the home. 

Mr. Akampoi was full of gratitude for the donation. “This visit is a signal to the children that they are not outcasts but part of the society,” he said. 

Story by Edward Adeti