Day 2

I’m so tired!!! Its only 9pm and I’m in bed! I’m absolutely shattered! Today I ahd to be at TLC for 8:30am! Once I got there I was put doing storage clean out. We had to tidy boxes of hundreds of milk formula! The upstairs part had to be tided so I got that job!! Next we transported so much baby equipment from the stores to the outside garage. We also moved 1600ish baby food jars that were out of date. Its such a shame really. People give TLC out of date food as if they would feed babies stuff that isn’t valid for children normally. It feels like these children are regarded as second-class citizens!
I did a lot of manual lifting today – it was such hard work but also very fun! My ankles and back kills now though!
After doing all the lifting I hung out in creepy crawlies and grubs for a bit. While in grubs Marion (team leader) asked me if I wanted to go with one of the TLC staff to pick up 2 new premature babies that had been abandoned in Johannesburg hospital! On the way to the hospital I found out a lot about some of the babies stories and stuff. One of the sad stories was that there are lots of girls between 12 and 14 that are raped due to the old wives tale that sex with a virgin will cure HIV. Many of these girls then become pregnant. One of these girls still lives at TLC and is such a strong girl, I feel so proud to have met such a strong character.
At the hospital we went up to the baby ward and went to 2 incubators. The babies were just so tiny!! As soon as I saw them I fell in love with them. I was asked to dress the baby girl and get her ready to leave. I remember just sitting there looking at her and thinking how beautiful she was. She was born August 2nd and was 8 weeks premature weighing just 1.6kg!
When we got back to TLC both babies were placed in incubators and I was allowed to feed the baby girl, it was so amazing!! Later on the manager of TLC, Joanna came round and named the babies Trevor and Melinda.
Other things that happened today was that 2 babies Neo and Funiwe (Soon to be called Isabelle) have new parents. Neo is going to a new home in Germany. His new family are lovely! They already have a little girl that they adopted from Vietnam, she’s so cute too! Funiwe is going to a family in Denmark.
One of the little girls at TLC is 18 month old Faith, she is in hospital at the moment with pneumonia, we aren’t sure if she will survive. It’s really sad.