Another Year of Progress
The past year found me at Humanity Home for nearly nine months. So much has happened. We are settled into our new home. There were numerous construction issues but we have fixed many of them and we have come to appreciate more and more what a miracle, in this environment and these circumstances, our new home really is. We had the site re-graded and drainage installed. Grass has filled in the yard. We added a basketball area. We continue to work on the last few construction defects.
We have constantly had issues with schools over beating children. Hitting children in schools is illegal, but schools too often ignore that law. We never strike a child. Our kids come from all kinds of abuse and neglect and we spend 24-7 trying to give them reason to believe that the world is a safe place where they can thrive and grow. When a teacher they should be able to trust hits them, that is a major setback. When we learned that a teacher at their former school had slapped LJ, that was entirely unacceptable. We moved the primary school kids to a new school. Their new teachers were quick to learn who our kids are and they like our kids, and the kids have responded and are doing better in school across the board. We played baseball with the student body, which gave our kids cachet with their classmates. They get home from school much earlier so we have time to work with them on their homework and still play catch in the front yard. It is rewarding to see all the kids growing so big.
We have five girls in boarding school for secondary school. Boarding school for secondary school is the norm in Kenya. We do not like it because the conditions are terrible and the kids are isolated from us. We recently moved three of the girls to a school closer to home, where conditions are more humane and they can come home on weekends so we can see how they are doing. We are excited about the change.
We fight for our kids and make changes when necessary.
We lost two kids in January. One little boy had problems that we could not solve that were likely to harm other kids in the family. A little girl was reclaimed by her mother, which we hope is a good thing. We move on.
In March, we brought in a 16-month-old girl, Riley, who was our youngest up to that point by a full year. In May, we bought in tiny Mia, who was 19 months old and weighed just 11 pounds. We nursed her back to health. Her weight has more than doubled and in mid-October she took her first steps! I early August, in our travels we met a little girl named Adhiambo. She has sickle cell disease but was not receiving the nutrition and medication needed to survive. We brought her in and promptly took her for gallbladder surgery, which is a complication of sickle cell. She is thriving. In mid-August, within a 24-hour period, the children’s department asked us to take in six children whose back stories are awful. Two of them are toddlers. This was daunting, but we accepted the challenge and they are now doing well and are part of our family. This is what we do.
My time at HH overall was absolutely wonderful. We have a beautiful, growing, healthy family. Judy continues to amaze me. HH is a heck of an operation. We love doing this.