More Than Cuddling Babies

At Neema House we do a lot more than just cuddling and taking care of babies. When you have 27 infants in the house there are endless jobs to do. Since I’ve been here I’ve mopped floors, labelled nappies (small, medium and large for the different sized babies), cleaned up numerous lots of vomit, cut up mountains of vegetables, helped make stew and corn bread, whizzed up baby food, grated coconut, emptied and sorted drawers, tallied up what babies are eating… the list could go on and on forever.

One day last week Safina was running behind in the kitchen so she asked if one of us volunteers could come in and help her. I was the lucky one! She presented me with a pile of vegetables, which seemed to be nearly as tall as I was. I asked her what type of vegetable they were, as they looked similar to spinach, but not quite. She called them “mboga” which translated simply means vegetable, so that wasn’t very helpful. I was also presented with a knife that had definitely seen better days – the handle was split in two and the blade kept falling apart so I literally had to hold it together as I cut. No problem, I thought. An hour later I was still there and I eventually had to give up because the knife had given me a big blister on my hand and it was simply too painful to continue!

Safina showed me the right way to cut mboga.

Another day Safina needed help grating fresh coconut. They have a wooden device that you sit on, which then has a rough blade to the side which you use to grate the coconut. It looked far easier than it actually was! Aldelien, Shermaine and I all had a turn, but unfortunately none of us were very good at it. Martin, a local volunteer, kept stopping us and saying, “No, no, not like that!” He tried to show us, but we still couldn’t get it. It was fun to try anyway! As a child I remember my Samoan grandfather having a similar device that he used to grate coconut to make traditional deserts.

Martin tried (and failed) to show me how to do it right

Something that never ends in a place with so many babies is the laundry. No matter how many times a day you wash, it never seems to be enough. Michael and Dorris, who live at Neema House, say that sometimes they have gotten out of bed at 3 in the morning to put a load of their personal washing in, only to find that the washer is already full! It seems to take hours every day to fold all the clothing and put all the reusable nappies back together again. Once all the clothes are folded though, they simply get stuffed into overflowing drawers. Big clothes in little baby drawers and pink clothes in boys drawers – it’s never very organised!

This was a problem that Lori, Lita and I decided to address on Friday. In the little baby room there are seven babies, each of whom has a drawer, which is meant to be filled with their own clothes. This is an idea that works well in theory, but not so well in reality. We pulled all the clothes out of all the drawers and were left with this…

Enough clothes for 20 babies! (Notice Beulah chilling on the mat at the front with the piles of clothes). It took probably two or three hours to sort all the clothes into boys and girls and then into different sizes. We can’t really go by the sizing on the tag as the clothes are likely to have either stretched or shrunk, not to mention the fact that a lot of our babies are not the right size for their age. Then we picked out about 10 outfits for each baby and put them back in their drawers. The left over amount of clothes was enough to clothe a dozen more babies! Provided of course that we wash multiple times a day, which we definitely do.

Today my roles (aside from the usual looking after baby duties that are a given at Neema), I was a blower-up of balloons, a bubble blower and therefore toddler entertainer (I loved our improvised bubble wand - a twisted coathanger!) and a party decorator.

Nicole and I were in charge of decorating the triplet's birthday party with balloons.

The triplets turned one yesterday, July 6, so we had a party for them this afternoon in the backyard.

So there you go… for all those people who asked what I was going to do for 8 months, this is it. Laundry and cleaning and cooking and tidying and planning and organising and babies and babies and babies.

This morning in my devotional book I read a quote that I loved:

“And because we look for the bonfire, we miss the candle. Because we listen for the shout, we miss the whisper. But it is in burnished candles that God comes and through whispered promises he speaks: ‘When in doubt, look around; I am closer than you think.’”

I liked that. God is here through the mundane daily tasks as well as the big experiences. He is even here, especially here, in Africa where the need for a hope beyond poverty is desperate. And He is here for those of us who have stepped out in faith and come to serve Him with what little we have.

xoxo,

-Hannah