Huffpo

I wrote this piece as a blog post that will (hopefully!) be going up on Huffington Post in a few days, thanks to my cousin Ben. 

Love is a funny thing. I fell in love with my daughter Zawadi the first moment I saw her, big head perched precariously on her shrunken little body, sitting with five other babies being fed in turn from the same spoon. She was my baby bird, delicate but could she ever squawk! Just over a year old at the time, she was not even crawling, unable to find the strength to push herself up – but that never stopped her. From day one, she would wiggle-worm her way across the floor to my lap, and nudge out whoever was sitting there, even if they were three times her size. As I got her treatment for the parasites that were preventing her from growing, her big personality began to shine through, and not just when she could muster up the energy. Now she is four, has been home with us for almost a year, is nicknamed “serotonin” for the joy she brings everyone she meets, giggling hysterically when she falls over, begging me to let her sleep in our bed.

 

It took a bit longer with my son. He didn't seek out attention from volunteers – he was almost three and still couldn't walk due to bad rickets from early malnutrition, before arriving at the orphanage. He was shy, sensitive, and withdrawn, but I soon noticed that whenever he thought no one was listening, he would sing to himself, tell stories, laugh. I took him to several doctors trying to get first a diagnosis and then treatment for his rickets, and his sweet and silly personality began to emerge. Saimoni is deeply good, he can't stand the idea of hurting or disappointing anyone, and to this day, he is constantly making up songs and stories. The main difference is that now they're in English and Swahili, and we can't get him to stop talking!

I was so lucky to be able to take these two home, adopt them, become their mom. But there are more than 30 other children we work with, and hundreds if not thousands more in need just within a few miles of us. All of our kids have no mother and most of them have no father, and the hard truth is that they will be in institutions for the rest of their lives. Tanzania has extremely strict and onerous adoption laws that make it impossible to adopt without spending from one to three years living on the ground, and with most local families already caring for at least one orphaned relative, there are nowhere near enough Tanzanians with the resources left over to take them in. Up until about 8 years ago, the orphanage we work with had to send children back to their village at age five, whether or not they had caretakers willing and able to take them. According to the head Mama, who has been doing this work for more than 25 years, at least a quarter of them were abused, neglected or dead within a year. Before now, the best they could hope for was to be sent to boarding school at five, going from orphanage to boarding school and leaving with no home base, no connection to their community, and no idea how to live in a family.

We're trying to change that, for these children, on the scale that we can. Our organization, founded in 2010 to support and partner with a local orphanage and improve the care the children receive, is ready to expand. We are currently running an online auction, with the aim of covering the cost of a 3.5 acre piece of land to create a children's village. There, the kids will live until their late teens in family-style homes with up to 10 children per house, consistent caretakers, attending high quality day school, in as close to a family environment as we can provide. This will allow us to take in many more orphaned children, including those with HIV and other health conditions, as well as expand our outreach program to keep children in families whenever possible.

I couldn't adopt every one of the orphanage kids. We can't provide even this type of environment for more than a fraction of the children in need in this country alone. But that doesn't mean we are powerless. Our organization's name, The Small Things, comes from a quote from Mother Teresa: “We ourselves know that we are just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less without that missing drop. We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” This is our small effort, our tiny contribution, but it is not small for these children. For Hope, Ebenezer, and Peace, who were all close to death on arrival at the orphanage and are now thriving due to our one-to-one care program for premature babies. For my son, who is now so athletic and confident that you would never guess he has only been walking for less than three years. For my daughter, who brings me joy every day, who nearly died from a combination of malnutrition due to parasites and pneumonia. For Isaak, Auntie, and Shalom, who lost their mother just five months ago at the birth of Hope, their youngest sister, and are now reunited in our care, with their doting father returning every weekend from his job, which keeps him away day and night, to visit them. For Lulu and Neema and Baracka and Miriam and Anna and Priscilla and Angel and all of the rest who depend on our small efforts, from people all around the world, to give them the future their mothers would have wanted for them.

Want to be one of the small things that makes a difference for these kids? Check out our “Spread the Love” online auction (www.tinyurl.com/tstauction), running through February 15^th, and get great deals on all kinds of items while helping us get land to create the children's village and build families for these amazing kids. Or you can develop a long term relationship with one child by sponsoring them through our website (www.thesmallthings.org). And remember, next time you are tempted to brush something off as being too small to make a difference, that there is no such thing.