House of Loveness, Zimbabwe

"It is the heart that gives; the fingers just let go." -Ibo tribe, Nigeria In the next 48 hours, ten women and two of their children are joining me for a week long retreat in Zimbabwe.  I am filled with gratitude for the sacrifice they are making to leave their families during the Thanksgiving holiday, pack bags full of supplies to bring to the children and fly 20 plus hours to Zimbabwe. I have to believe the decision to come to Zimbabwe was made from their heart.  Their head might have given them another answer. On my first trip to Zimbabwe in 2008, I arrived to the news the baby I was to adopt had died.  I spent eight days in Zimbabwe to get her buried and in my head I knew I never wanted to go back.  But my heart led me to return again six weeks later with a wheelchair for Kuda, one of the abandoned children I met whose legs were so atrophied that he scooted on his hands across the dirty hospital floor.  No one ever thought he would walk but I wanted him off that hos

House of Loveness founder Betsy Blankenbaker meeting Primrose (November 2008) When I first met Primrose, she stared me down. She was only three years old but her gaze pierced my soul. She didn’t smile. Primrose was ‘living’ in the children’s ward of a hospital in Zimbabwe but she wasn’t sick. She was abandoned, or a dumped baby, as they call them in Zim.  There was no room in the nearby orphanages so Prim lived with six other dumbed babies in two cribs at the hospital.  The week before there had been ten babies sharing the cribs but four of them died.  I had arrived in Zimbabwe to adopt one of those babies, a five week old infant named Loveness. I buried her instead. In a country where a child under the age of five has about the same chance of living as dying, I didn’t want to see Primrose and the other dumped babies left at the hospital.  What kind of childhood is this? With the help of friends and family, I founded House of Loveness, an NGO to p