Hello. Goodbye.

Recently there have been a lot of comings and goings at Neema. When I arrived at Neema House we had 27 children. However, the previous co-director at Neema fostered one of them, Jack, and she took him with her when she left just after I got here. That made 26 babies and the number has stayed between 25 and 29 babies since I’ve been here. At the current premises we can take up to 30. Since I’ve been here five babies have left and six have arrived.

The first new baby was Gloria, who came with her mother Mary, to live at Neema House for a few months. Gloria was very premature and weighed only 4lbs at birth. Her mother is young and had nowhere to go after the baby was born. She has an aunt who she can go live with, but Gloria is too small to travel to the village yet. At the moment Mary and Gloria sleep in the big baby room and Mary helps out with the babies in her spare time. The other day Mary was helping us get the babies ready for bed and no one was quite sure what to do with Gloria – as soon as they set her down on the floor, Deborah (14 months old) would rush over and try and sit on her. We solved the problem by putting the still-tiny Gloria in a washing basket and putting her on the table so the other babies couldn’t harm her.

Gloria when she came to Neema House.

Gloria now.

Next five-month-old Gian arrived. His mother is 17 and still in school. She wants to finish her education so Gian has come to live with us for two years until she has finished her schooling. Gian was quite unhappy when he first arrived at Neema because he missed his mother. He got used to the nannies in the small baby room and was starting to show us his adorable dimpled smile, when he had to be moved to the big baby room to make room for new babies. He tends to cry a lot now!

After that two-week-old Ebenezer arrived. Being premature and only 4lb 10oz, his name is far bigger than he is! Ebenezer does a lot of sleeping and eating – he takes about 1-2oz of milk every two hours and he doesn’t cry much at all. Ebenezer’s mother died after a C-section at the local hospital and his father has other children to look after so he has signed Ebenezer over to Neema House until he has remarried and can take him back.

That same week 6-day-old Debora arrived. She was abandoned at the hostel where her mother had been staying and is only 5lb 6oz. She’s very sweet, but she cries a lot and has her days and nights mixed up. She sleeps all day and then stays up and cries all night, much to the delight of the nannies!

A week ago today we got baby Daniel. At 7lb 10oz he’s the biggest newborn we’ve had in a while! He was abandoned on the doorstep of a local lady’s house one evening She kept him over night and then took him to the police station in the morning. Her and her husband wanted to keep the baby, but they have to go through the proper channels to actually adopt him. Daniel (who she named) has come to stay with us in the meantime. We’re not sure when exactly he was born, but he still had his umbilical cord stump, so it must have been in the previous couple of days. When he arrived he had a bath and got a clean set of clothes and then I gave him his first bottle at Neema. The 2oz was gone in a flash – perhaps he’s going to be the next Bahati!

Daniel's first day at Neema House.

I love all the new babies, but I love Daniel most. At only about 9 days old he still has that sleepy, newborn look - like he's not quite sure why everything's so bright and noisy. I wish Daniel's mother could be here to love him, but because she can't be, I'll love him for her. I wish a family for you Daniel and for all the other abandoned babies. You deserve all the love you can get.

Our last new baby is little Sarah, who was also abandoned at the local hospital. She will probably be put up for adoption, as we don't know who her parents are. I didn't realise quite how tiny she was until I took her clothes off to give her a bath the other day!

Neema House stretches at the seams with new babies and our hearts expand at the same rate. I used to wonder how you could cope with so many children – so many hugs and kisses to receive, but also so much more worry if they are sick or unhappy. How can you love them all? I have found that love is endless. No matter how many babies you love, you can always love more.

Unfortunately in an orphanage, babies not only arrive, but they leave. In most cases this is good, as they are going back to family who love them and they will be brought up in their own culture. Neema House takes in a lot of babies temporarily after their mother's have died in childbirth. These children will go back to their father or extended family eventually. I hope in some corner of their minds the babies remember that we loved them in their first months or years of life - that they were safe and happy and cared for with us. However, there comes a time to give them back to the family they belong to.

The first babies to leave were Silvamus and Davis, Neema’s identical twins. They left Neema house on their 2^nd birthday, August 1. After their mother died they spent the first part of their life at Cradle of Love orphanage in nearby Usa River and then when Neema officially opened on June 1, 2012 they came here to live with us. Their father is a Tanzanite dealer (a precious stone found only in the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro) and was unable to take the boys back until he had remarried and had a wife to care for them. In the past few weeks he married and came to Neema to pick his boys up.

Silvamus and Davis were very sweet boys and very hard to tell apart from each other. Silvamus had a little dot on his left ear and Davis had a tiny white scar on his forehead. I was constantly checking ears to see which one was which! Silvamus was more outgoing and Davis was more of a cuddler.

Soon after that, another of our toddlers, Gilbert, also went home. His father is a street beggar in Arusha (he was unfortunately crippled after having polio as a child). Gilbert used to live with his mother, but when she became mentally unstable several months ago, he was brought to Neema House. At about 11 months old when he came, he had a hard time adjusting as he missed his mother a lot. Now he’s about 19 months old and his father arranged for him to go and live with his mother (Gilbert’s grandmother) in a village about 6 hours away. Gilbert was very upset to leave and we could hear him wailing as the car drove off down the street.

This past Sunday, Helena, left to go home to live with her aunt and grandmother. Helena was two-and-a-half and she was everybody’s favourite girl – partly because she was the only toddler girl and partly because she was just generally sweet and charming. She would run into the big baby room, kiss everyone, including the babies, and then run out again. After Silvamus and Davis left, there was a month where Helena and Joel were the only big kids. Often when I arrived at Neema they would both be sitting outside on the potty eating chapatti. Helena was a little mother and she always wanted us to tie a doll or teddy on her back. Other times you’d find her holding the hand of one of the smaller babies, helping them toddle down the hallway. She was ready to go home though and while everybody will miss her, it wasn’t hard to let her go. She will grow up out in the village with her grandmother and aunt to love her and look after her and she will be happy.

Yesterday though, little Joel (we pronounce it Jo-ell-ee) left and that was hard. Joel was brought to Neema last year as he was an at-risk baby. He was extremely malnourished and he had burns on one of his feet. He’s two-and-a-half now (although he could be older because his age is estimated), but he’s still tiny, weighing at least 4kg less than Helena who is supposedly the same age. Joel was the smartest child I’ve ever met and he knew every Neema employee and every Neema baby’s name. The first thing I would hear when I came in the door each morning was Joel’s voice shouting to me from the toddler room, “Annah! Annah!”

Happy days at Neema with "Cole" and Joel.

On Sunday Joel’s grandmother came and stated that she wanted to take him back. Unfortunately no one protested, despite the fact that this was the home he had been taken out of and that he is still very malnourished. He is also emotional, has strong bonds with the nannies, babies and volunteers, and is terrified of his grandmother (on the rare occasion that she came to visit, he would cry and refuse to even look at her). I’ve been told that at other orphanages the families are not allowed to just come and take the babies away. They have to come and spend time with them and when the child is happy with them and trusts them, then and only then, are they allowed to take them. Hopefully Neema House will develop a system like this in the near future as I worry for the state of mind of children who are suddenly snatched out of the life they have grown up in and deposited back with people they don’t know or trust. 

Joel went home on Tuesday. His Bibi (grandmother) came to pick him up and he cried the whole time the nannies were getting him cleaned up and changing his clothes. He kept talking about Helena and I can only assume that he knew that Helena had gone away and not come back, and that he was worried the same thing was happening to him. I asked to go with him when they left, thinking that perhaps it would help calm him down if there was someone that he was comfortable with there. It did somewhat and he perked up on the car ride, looking out the window and pointing at the dala dalas and piki pikis as they passed by.

I thought that it was a bad situation that he was going home to, but it turned out to be far worse than any of us had imagined. A tiny house, no other relatives to help Bibi with him, no power or clean water, a cow in the front yard and a river of effluent flowing through the tiny yard that Joel is expected to play in. I know this is not unusual for Africa, but this is a small and vulnerable child, whose only knowledge is being loved and looked after in a Western environment. I’m all for integrating children back into their homes and villages, but to pluck him out of his home without warning and set him down with a relative he's scared of and can’t even bear to look at, was almost too much for me. I didn’t want to leave him there and as we went back to the car, listening to him crying as Bibi took him away, I wanted to cry myself.

Joel wasn’t ready to go home and I worry about him. I was up for hours in the night, thinking and praying and wishing I knew that he was safe. He’s still malnourished and recently has had malaria. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to see that in a situation like that he could easily lose weight and it will be a miracle if he doesn’t get sick again.

Most of the babies are fine to go home, but some are different. They have different temperaments and we need to treat them accordingly. For the most part I’m happy that they are going back to people that love them and that they will grow up in their own home and their own culture. Not Joel though. My heart hurt for him yesterday and it hurts for him still.

Please pray for Joel and for these children.

xoxo,

-Hannah