"Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever fresh and radiant possibility" ~Kate Douglas Wiggin

Today was Day 2 of my new schedule at the orphanage. It is SO MUCH BETTER than the class of the WWW! Allow me to back up…

The orphanage is an old hospital that is two stories. I’ve been on the first floor with the older children this whole time and was finally able to go upstairs and see the babies yesterday! Mohamed (our Country Director) led me into a large room separated into three smaller areas with…Drum roll, please… 38 newborns. The oldest can’t be more than four or five months old and the youngest are easily preemie and still not yet at their correct birth age (we’re talking days old and some less than 3lbs). I was quickly given a little girl of about 6 weeks and told to feed her a scorching hot bottle (for the moms out there, we’re talking 8oz 4+hours apart at just days old because they don’t have time to feed 40 newborns 2-4oz every 2 hours as we would back home). As she was sucking down her glass bottle with a giant plastic nipple that has an opening as long as the width of my fingernail, I tried to console Mustapha who was having a coronary over not getting his fix first.

It’s crazy. To think about how I ran to the little girl I nanny back home when she was a newborn at every and any random sound or squeak she made, and how there are now 15 newborns around me crying louder and harder than any sane person would ever want to hear… Well, it was a bit much to say the least. These kids don’t have a mom, dad, and nanny to run to their every need. At just days old, it’s already survival of the fittest and a competition. I tried to feed the babes as fast as I could and still give them some personal time before setting them back in their see-through plastic “You’ve just been born” crib before moving on to feed another starving face. After all the babies are fed the nurses shoo us out the door so they can sleep, and we move on to the toddlers down the hallway.

Yesterday I was in charge of a little black her named Iman who is said to be about 2 ½. She is absolutely gorgeous and just a kick to be around! She is one of the few girls left in her age group and I believe she has some sort of mentally disability because she still doesn’t talk at all (her disability means she will never be adopted). She knows what she wants though, and is a fast little bugger as she runs down the forbidden halls, clueless that I’m getting dirty looks and shakes of the finger from all the nurses! Today I was asked to take little Illyas out, who must be about 14 months and is not yet walking. It looks like he had some sort of leg surgery around his upper calf area, and I found a lump on his foot. I’m dying to know- was he given up after they found the lumps, or did he just get dealt a bad hand with being both an orphan and having some sort of illness that causes tumors?

The work continues to be a challenge, and I’m still beyond grateful that I’ve had this opportunity. As I walked into the newborn room, it was as I jumped in a time machine and could picture doing the same thing several years from now as an adoptive mother. I don’t know how it will work, when it will happen, and what the circumstances will be, but I am beyond certain that it WILL happen. There is no way I could ever walk away from what I’ve experienced in just these couple of weeks. I wish I could take the entire clan of 250+ plus at the orphanage home with me, but I will remain hopeful that one day (a long time from now), I will grow to love a similar little soul as my own.

I couldn’t be more excited!