On the morning of 12th June 2026, something quietly powerful happened in the neighbourhood surrounding Tabitha Home. Our children and staff stepped outside the gate, put on their gloves and nose masks, picked up their cleaning tools, and got to work.
No fanfare. No audience. Just people who care, deciding to show it.
The Community Sanitation Project was part of our ongoing commitment to raising children who are not just recipients of care but active contributors to the communities they live in. We cleared drains, swept roads, and cleaned walkways in our immediate environment. It was physical, unglamorous work, and the children gave it everything they had.
What struck us most was not the clean streets at the end of it. It was watching a fourteen-year-old guide a younger child on how to properly bag refuse. It was the laughter that broke out mid-clean when someone accidentally stepped in something unpleasant. It was the way children who had been shy during morning devotion suddenly became leaders out on the road, directing each other, encouraging each other, working side by side without being told to.
We talk a lot at Tabitha Home about building character. We run programmes, hold family meetings, bring in facilitators and trainers. But some of the most important lessons our children learn happen in moments like these, when they are doing something ordinary, together, for someone else.
There is a concept we come back to often in our work: service as identity. We want our children to grow up understanding that caring for their environment is not something someone else does. It is something they do. It belongs to them. When a child internalises that, something shifts. They begin to see themselves differently. Not as people things happen to, but as people who make things happen.
The sanitation exercise lasted a few hours. The streets are probably dusty again by now. But the children who were there that morning carry something from it that will last much longer than clean pavements. They know they showed up. They know they worked hard. And they know that the community around them is better, even a little bit, because they were in it.
That is what we are building at Tabitha Home, one small act at a time.
If you would like to support the work we do with vulnerable children in Ibadan, visit www.tabithahome.org.
