A caring organisation is finding homes for abandoned babies, writes Aaron Nicodemus
Ten years ago, the maternity ward at Pietermaritzburg’s Edendale hospital was overflowing with abandoned babies. At one stage it was caring for 64 infants. They lived three or four to a crib and received barely adequate medical care. They were unwanted and unloved.
Today, although there are still a significant number of abandoned babies in the ward, many have found loving homes outside the hospital.
The Thandanani Association, a group that cares for abandoned children in two Pietermaritzburg hospitals, has created links between government institutions and the community. The association actively searches for parents to adopt abandoned children.
Foster mothers like Pam Boake help fill the gap between the hospital and a new home. Boake and her husband have cared for 101 abandoned, sick, abused and neglected children in 16 years.
“I was born with a very maternal desire to help less fortunate children,” says Boake. “Whenever I see one of these babies, I have an immediate reaction of wanting to help.”
The couple has adopted five children and acts as foster parents to others while they wait to be adopted – or before they die.
The babies who come into Boake’s care are usually very sick. She currently has a baby in her care with brittle bone disease. “If you pick her up incorrectly, her bones will break,” explains Boake. Another baby has Aids. “I don’t have any normal babies,” she says.
Recently two babies died in Boake’s care. “One doesn’t look after these children without loving them. I go through a tremendous sense of loss,” she says. “Most of the babies who die are so sick … when they die there’s no more suffering. They are at peace.”
Penny Haswell adopted a mentally handicapped boy named Nicolaas 12 years ago. She also adopted a daughter, Ningi Mcunu-Haswell, who arrived at Haswell’s door suffering from severe malnutrition. Eleven years later Ningi is a well-adjusted girl, excelling in her studies and described by her adopted mother as “a bit cheeky”.
“We care,” says Haswell in an attempt to sum up why she and her husband adopt abandoned children. “We didn’t want these children to go to a police station or a hospital. They need to be in loving arms. They need to be with a family.”
Boake and Haswell are part of a small minority of white parents adopting black children. According to Kemmy Christian, the supervisor of the special needs placement unit for the Child and Family Welfare Society of Pietermaritzburg, of the 51 abandoned children it has placed in adoptive homes over the past three years, only 10 were placed with white, Indian or coloured families. The majority were placed in black homes.
Babies with serious health problems, like those who are HIV-positive or have disabilities, may be abandoned because of the emotional and financial toll caring for them entails.
Healthy babies are also abandoned. Some teenage mothers abscond from the hospital after giving birth, in the belief that the babies they leave behind will be cared for. When parents are killed or forced to move because of violence, their relatives often cannot find the child through a maze of bureaucracy. There are also numerous cases of child abandonment by parents who are too poor, drug-dependent or too sick to care for a child.
“They’re left and abandoned for all the complicated reasons that make us South Africans,” says Linda Aadnesgaard, the director of the Thandanani Association.
Christian says that 27 abandoned children were referred to the welfare society in 1998, down from 49 the previous year. Six of these children were HIV-positive, 14 were placed with adoptive families, five were placed in foster care, one was referred to another agency and another died. Ten years ago all of these babies would have grown up in the hospital, even the healthy ones.
Christian says that while the society has experienced a decrease in the number of abandoned children, “this does not imply that the situation is getting better”.
She credits the hard work of various local private and public agencies “who have been instrumental in setting up appropriate structures for dealing with abandoned children”.
One of these groups is Thandanani, which means “love one another”. The association facilitates the process of placing abandoned children with adoptive parents, and has also set up a community care network within the black community.
The network establishes “safe houses” for abused children, organises volunteer caregivers and helps children find the help they need. The end goal is to provide care and support for children in desperate need of both.
Those who work with abandoned babies say that it is not a white issue or a black issue. It is one of compassion and respect for the dignity of human life.
“We need people to come forward and do what they can,” says Haswell, who has seven children of her own. “Even if it’s just taking a child out of the hospital for a weekend, or paying for their school fees, it makes a difference in their lives.”