Today I went to the infant home near here at 7:15 to help feed the babies. I'm not sure how much help I was - first off, I am not a baby person, and second, I don't speak the local language. But most people speak English, even if they kids don't really yet, so it was fine. And turns out, shoving a spoon of porridge at a baby's mouth isn't that tricky, because they don't care if it gets all over their face, and I had an all-covering apron over my clothes so I didn't really care if it got all over me, so we were good. The bottle feeding was pretty easy too. And I picked up a couple of ridiculously tiny, malnourished babies and moved them from feeding area to changing area without any heads falling off, so that overcame my fear a little bit, which was good. One of the little girls about broke my heart though. Such a sweet smile and so little substance to her!
It's really cool what they do here - bring in children who are either abandoned or their families can't afford to raise them because the mother died, and formula is just too much for many families. Then when the children are 2 years old, they try to integrate them back into their family and community, and have a really high success rate. At that age they can eat most things that the rest of the family eats so it's not such a burden to look after them. Plus they can go to nursery school, and the charity has been building these and also continues to support the poorest families financially with raising the kids. Sometimes it doesn't work and the money doesn't get to the child or the family is clearly not looking after the child when they re-visit, so they come back to the home. Then often they try again later, or sometimes the child ends up in foster care - a 'mother' has a house with her own kids and 4-6 more children so they have more of a family environment. Later in the week I'm hopefully going to teach a little boy with mild cerebral palsy some piano/music lessons, he's in one of the foster homes.
What was interesting to learn is that it's this charity, or one just like it (she definitely visited this home), that Madonna adopted her first Malawian child from - hence all the controversy. Like most of these kids, it was just supposed to be temporary that he was in the home until he could go back to his family and community, but in swooped Madonna and now he's being raised the child of a major celebrity. I think all parties have come around to the situation, but it's interesting to understand the complexity of it a bit more. Especially crazy that she did the same thing three years later. And what I really don't get, is why she needed one that had a family. There are many that are straight up abandoned so don't have a family to go back to at all, especially the ones with HIV/AIDS. But I don't think I'll get anywhere trying to understand the mind of one of the most famous pop singers in the wold. :)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment