Cradle of Love Baby Home - My TZ Placement

First off I have to apologize for the delay in this, I have been ridiculously busy and lazy at the same time haha. I'll update now, i'm only a week and a bit late no big deal!

Okay so Cradle of Love is a baby orphanage run by an American woman, and funded by and American Church, it is very very well maintained and structured, so not what your typical African orphanage would probably be.

To get there and back everyday is a long commute, mine is the longest commute of all of the volunteers that are in the volunteer house right now I believe. It is about 20 km outside of Arusha, and  not so conveniently on the opposite side of Arusha from where I live. So I leave at 8ish and take a yellow dala dala (300shillings - 20 some cents) for 20ish minutes and then I take a green dala dala (500 shillings) for about 35 minutes. Then just walk down a road for a bit.  So all in all its about an hour each way, and transportation costs me 1600 shillings a day which is just over 1CND dollar, so I really can't complain.

There are over 40 babies at the orphanage right now, and it always seems to be quite full. Each one of the babies has a different story and different background, and all of the are at CoL for different reasons. For many their mothers will have died during child birth and their fathers can't support them until they are older, so they will stay at Cradle until they are older. Others have simply been abandoned and left on their own essentially, For many women in TZ it is quite shameful to give up your child, so many will go off have the child on their own, and pretend that the baby died, and they will simply leave it there. Other times mothers will have their baby at a hospital and then sneak out of the hospital leaving the child there. These are all the children that we receive at Cradle. Their ages range from days old to 3.5 years old.

My job really just consists of playing with the babies, whom are seperated into groups by different developmental stages (almost all of them are developmentally delayed.) We also do their feedings and put them down for naps.
My second day of placement I was in the nursery which is for Newborns to about 6 months-ish. Here you make bottles, feed, change, and rock the babies. It is very easy and all of the children just crave attention so much, it is quite common to have 5 or 6 of them crawling on you at one point. Sometimes are sadder than others when you think about everything they have come through already at such a young age, and to be able to physically see the trauma that they have from abandonment and such. They truly are in the best place they could be now though.

On my 3rd day we took 9 of the babies to a free clinic down the road called Dream, which is funded by a company from Madrid. 1 of the little girls Pendo is HIV + and she had another ear infection, so we had to take her for medicine. The other 8 were suspected of being HIV+ due to the backgrounds they came from. We got one of them tested, little Amani and he came back negative, so that was fantastic and put everyone in good spirits.

Well my internet time is nearly up so I will have to tell you more later when there is more to report. Missing everybody at home. I will also write a blog about my Mount Meru climbing adventures from last weekend, which literally include near death experiences! All is well though, I'm fine clearly. Hahahah

Cheers!