Mama Amelia’s Orphanage

This morning the students and their hosts went to their first class and then we all went to the home economics room to bake cookies (“biscuits”) together. We made 10 batches of cookies and packed up our bags and bags of clothes and toys brought from the U.S. and headed out to Mama Amelia’s orphanage.

Mama Amelia is an inspirational person and I am humbled by her. She has had this “family” for about 15 years and has 100s of children from newborns through their late teens. Most of the children are found and delivered to her – some found in the latrines, some in the woods – some delivered by the police other orphans from the villages – they come from all different places to her and she truly is their Mama.

We arrived to tour the house which has been added onto over the years and consists of several rooms. There is one closet that has all the clothes for the orphanage and it is communal – everyone shares everything. We only saw the children under the age of about 5 – those who were not at school - there must have been 80 or so. We saw where they slept, we played, we held them - we laughed. The children we met, because they had not yet been to school, only spoke Khoisan. We delivered the bags of clothes and toys we had been carrying around for two weeks and they were delighted.

When we came back to St. Cyprian’s we all sat for a while and talked about what we had seen and how we felt. The message our students took away was that despite the cramped quarters, these children were loved and cared for. They were clean and happy. As a parent who has tried to simply feed a meal to a small class of toddlers – I can not imagine how she and her teenage helpers manage to feed, bathe and clothes 80 toddlers – not to mention all the kids we didn’t see from age 5 and up who were at school. She is by no stretch of the imagination – a saint.

We talked about how we could help Mama Amelia – I asked what she needed and how we might help her – she pointed to her fence which was a combination of random wood slats, chain link fencing and lots of barbed wire. She said she needed a real fence around her property that wasn’t made of found barbed wire because the children get hurt. David independently asked her the same thing and she told him she needed more than her rented port-o-potty she really needed a toilet. We are talking about ways we can raise some money to help them get these few basic things.

I asked her about her “family” and she proceeded to tell me how she was going to build a school on her lot for children with disabilities because she sees a need to help deaf and learning disabled children that the local school can’t provide.

In small corners of the world there are so many people taking care of the worlds children – they often seem to go unnoticed. Somehow I think we will be back, how could we not?