The Happy Home, Suva Fiji

Happy Home – a home of happiness for Sujit Kumar and boys at-risk

Establishing Happy Home in 2006 was undertaken with a lot of love from a lot of people – over 200 in fact – from all over the world to undertake an Extreme Make-Over of a very run down but beautiful old government ‘plantation’ home located on Richards Road, Domain, in order to make it into a wonderful, safe and secure family home for Sujit Kumar and other boys at-risk

For anyone to visit the Happy Home and to meet Sujit Kumar and the boys, they will be instantly be filled with happiness and joy and see this reflected on the faces of the boys. It is easy to overlook that each child has a sad story to tell – least not Sujit Kumar who was from a toddler put with chickens and so developed chicken-like behaviour, and at 8 years old was taken in by Social Welfare and put into a home for the aged where he stayed for the next 20 years tied by strips of sheet, to his bed, suffering one of the worst cases of abuse. Sujit has now identified very firmly that the Happy Home is his family home where he fits right into place with the other boys, missing them terribly when they go on break.

We persevere to make the boys feel very much that the Happy Home is their ‘family’ home – one little boy suggested that we have an arch to grow roses over it so that one day, when he grows up, he can bring his sweetheart back to the Happy Home and be married there. So we have that arch and we now have roses growing over it – just in case!

It is always a struggle to maintain the funding level required to finance the operations of a home for children, particularly when we want to provide for them as much like any other child would have in their own home – but so far we have survived on private donations and no doubt as we become more established we will fare better from local assistance. Click here to learn more about how you can help.

The staff are ‘hand picked’ by the management, in order to take good care of Sujit and the boys, to instill in them the independence, confidence and character traits they need for life – and to be a successful member of the community and to be encouraged to one day have a family of their own.

We feel that ‘family’ is so important and it has been our aim is to re-engage the boys with their extended families where possible, or to arrange foster care during the holidays to give them a ‘real’ family to experience. But they can be assured of one thing within the Happy Home and that is that they are loved for who they are

A very big hug and thank you for your thoughts, your generous financial and in-kind support that has been made to establish and to keep this wonderful Happy Home 'alive' over the past three years. We would love you to visit us should you come to Fiji as we always love to meet people from overseas.