Josephine Morgan, Liberia, "The orphanage was taking our pictures and sending them to America."

Josephine Morgan comes from a poor family. Her father, hoping for a better life for his children, agreed to an offer made by the head of an orphanage to take Josephine, her sister and her young brother. But the head of the orphanage is alleged to have taken the children so he could claim he needed an increase in international assistance. Very little of the money he got appears to have been spent on the children. Now, after three years, Josephine has been reunited with her parents. She told IRIN of her ordeal.

“It was on a Sunday afternoon when my father and mother took me, my younger brother and my elder sister to an orphanage home. My dad told me that the orphanage is owned by a church and they would feed us, buy clothes for us, and send us to a good hospital and school. We all were happy to be at the orphanage, because of what daddy told us.

But after one week they stopped giving us breakfast and we were eating only one time a day in the afternoon. Most times we had to cook our own food. They were not giving us clothes and when we fell sick, we did not go to the hospital. We had to clean the orphanage.

The life in the orphanage was bad. We were six children living in one room and the room’s roof leaked when it rained. So, when the rain fell at night, we could not sleep. The man who owned the orphanage was always taking our pictures and sending them to America.

I was missing my father and mother. Thank God I am now back home living with them. It is better to be with parents than to live in an orphanage.”

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