The Unimaginable...

(This photo is one I took on my first visit to South Africa.)



I cannot find the words to describe what I witnessed yesterday. Two other staff members and I went to visit a home we had heard about in Illovo (an impoverished area near downtown Johannesburg). When we arrived at the house, we were greeted by a woman who estimated that she had 29 children, mostly infants and toddlers, living in her three bedroom home. She wasn’t even sure how many children were in her home! We could smell the house as we walked through the dogs and mud that filled the yard. Once inside, the smell was nauseating. Three babies sat in infant chairs on top of the counter and a little boy, maybe a year and a half old, sat on the dirty and broken floor staring blankly – not a toy in sight.
The poor woman herself looked just exhausted as she had only that morning been released from the hospital with Hepatitis. Her skin and eyes were so yellow. As she toured us around the house she opened the door to a bedroom in which 5 babies laid in cribs and 6 more with laying on the floor, again with not a single toy. Just left to lay there with the door closed. Inside one of the cribs was a set of premature twins that she said were three months old. They were smaller than most newborns. From that room she took us into a second room filled with wall to wall cribs – sitting inside each was a toddler. One of the toddlers was an older sister of the twins, named Rachel, maybe a year and a half old, who was lying in a crib covered in scabies. The woman touched Rachel's leg to show us her sores and she just SCREAMED. She is such a beautiful baby girl. There were older children in the yard, well above school age, in the middle of the morning on a Wednesday...
The cribs themselves were just filthy. As we left the bedrooms we walked past a baby boy, maybe only 9 months old, who had thrown up all over himself and the floor, and no one had even noticed until we walked by. We are going to try to sort things out with her (she has all of the children there without a license of any kind, no record of who they are - so that we can take as many as possible as quickly as our homes can manage I think. We so strongly feel thazt we must get them out of there. They've all now probably been exposed to Hepatitis as well. The home had a stench that made all of us ill, and a roach crawled across the table in front of us as we sat talking with her.
It is so frustrating to see something like that, where someone believes they are doing something good for these children, when so clearly they are just sustaining the same misery that these kids probably came from. I cannot fathom how that kind of situation is acceptable to anyone, or why she has waited so long to ask for help. I am so thankful that she is willing to give us so many of the little ones. They are human beings being treated far worse than animals...
My heart is just breaking for them to know that they are there even as I write this… and to know that there are well over a million more just like them in South Africa. I am praising God for the health and safety that our children live in our homes. We left the home wondering aloud the fastest ways in which more homes could be opened. The families who have partnered with us are part of God’s miracles for these incredible kids!