I have been following recent events concerning the Lourdes Home in Għajnsielem with a growing sense of despair, anger and helplessness. It is time the public and the commentators in the media learned the truth about the situation from another perspective - that of the children themselves.

I know what I am talking about because I have taught five of those children, aged between nine and 13, in their primary and secondary schools in Gozo. And after nearly 40 years of teaching children of similar age in Britain and Africa, I can tell a happy child when I see one. Those children, without exception, were happy. After a rotten start in life they had experienced love, stability and contentment at the Lourdes Home and at their schools. Now their lives are being thrown up in the air once again, they are being torn away from their friends, and they are terrified by the unknown future that lies before them.

It is not my place to apportion blame for the current situation, nor would I name names even if I were permitted to. I will only say that I have great respect and sympathy for the Bishop of Gozo. But the teachers at both schools and the Dominican sisters I have spoken to must remain anonymous. They are almost as much in despair as the children themselves. But they are not allowed to speak out, so I am doing it for them.

Here are some facts, from adults I know well and whose integrity I would lay down my life for:

1. A nine-year-old, already removed to a new "home" in Malta where he is the only boy, said that Għajnsielem was the only place in his whole life where he had been happy.

2. An 11-year-old boy ran away from school. Why? Because he was desperate to visit in hospital a Dominican sister who was the nearest he had had to a mother in his entire life - one of the very sisters now being pilloried as a child abuser.

3. A nine-year-old boy who is now at his fifth school says he wants to stay in Għajnsielem. He is not being given the choice.

4. A boy who had run away from his foster home was happy at both his primary and his secondary school in Gozo. Note the "was".

5. An 11-year-old girl, intelligent, occasionally naughty, with a smile that makes her a favourite with everybody, is now facing an uncertain future.

6. A teenage boy has recently spent the whole day in tears, raging at the fate which is about to remove him from his friends at school and at the Lourdes Home. He is, I am told, well integrated into Għajnsielem society, is well behaved, and is a regular attender at MUSEUM.

7. A boy is being returned to his mother, from whose care he had been removed in the first place.

8. Those children were so afraid of the Dominican sisters who now stand accused that at the end of the school day they would run up to them, waiting outside the school, and hug them!

One hears a lot about human rights these days - the rights of the unborn child, of prisoners, of illegal immigrants, of known terrorists in Britain. Will no one stand up for the human rights of these vulnerable and helpless children? They are being abused, but it is by the system, not by the sisters.

I hope everyone who has any say in their future will ponder the words of Somebody infinitely wiser than us 2,000 years ago: "If anyone shall cause one of these little ones to lose his faith in me, it would be better for that person to have a large millstone tied round his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea."