Granted, lots of days here are filled with fun and laughter and it's hardly comparable to a working day in the office at home. I am a very lucky girl. Volunteers come here and say 'but the kids are all so happy and healthy' because they are now, and it is difficult to remember sometimes that all these children have a story about how they came to live at the Baby Home.
However, the last couple of days here have been emotionally challenging, and it's times like this I sit in awe of Amy, as what I experienced was about a millionth of what Amy deals with on a daily basis.
A few days ago I went on my daily visit to Tiny Babies. I was pulling stupid faces at Briton and out of the corner of my eye I saw a little china doll staring upwards. This little girl is 6 weeks old, skinny as anything but with the softest hair and the biggest eyes. She had been in hospital since birth with her mother who is sick. Amy came across her mum crying in a room as her milk had dried up and therefore she could not feed her baby, but she was being discharged and had nowhere to go.
Amy took her under the 'Forever Angels wing' and now the mother lives close by and is trying to rest and get better, safe in the knowledge that her baby is being fed and cared for nearby.
Anyway my job in all this was to take the mother to hospital yesterday, and obtain all her medical cards and medicines. Again, just a small thing really, but as I sat in the nurses room I was thinking about how many stories there are like this and despite the fact I feel I know the baby home inside out there is so much more in the 'bigger picture' that I want to get to know, and maybe through all this I'll find out what I can/want to do when I eventually leave this place I call home?
On top of all this, I made a number of trips back and forth to the hospital to take some gifts. A container is coming from the UK in a matter of days and there are a lot of used, unwanted toys, nappies and clothes in the attic that need to be moved. We managed to fill 150 carrier bags and took them to the children's wards of the hospital.
We didn't stop and chat, we just went in, explained we had gifts for the children and handed them out. It was crazy... mamas were chasing us down the corridor for a gift, and in one room that held 8 beds there were about 29 patients. We saw awful suffering along the way, but it wasn't until I got home that I really thought about it. There was an albino child with a deep open head wound the size of my palm. There was a child with all her head, neck, arms and calves burnt and infected. There was a mother screaming in the corridor as her child was being rushed away. There was a toddler the size of a newborn baby and had literally not a gram of fat on him (think of those famous Oxfam adverts). I'm sure there are terrible stories of pain in England, but throw in the poor hygiene of the place, the length of time you have to be in hospital to get anything done and the fact that you have to share your bed with up to five other children and it just makes you think a lot about a lot of things.
Throw in today's post about Shalom and Charles (read it yourself at www.foreverangels.org) and collectively it just made for a few days of deep thought. Keep these babies, mamas and families in your thoughts, especially when you think life is hard there....
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