Time at the Orphanage in Belmopan!

Journal Entry - Babies, babies, and more babies!!!

Today after class, a few of us got the opportunity to go to an orphanage in Belmopan and help out with whatever they needed and play with the kids. It has been my favorite thing thus far on the trip. I loved getting to meet and play with all of the kids from the few months old Raboni, to the older teenagers, it was just a really cool experience.
Raboni was a baby brought straight from the hospital after she was born and has been at the orphanage ever since. She is about 5-7 months old, I'm not really sure and no one told me. She has trouble keeping her food down, so we had to give her a special baby formula with added cereal to make it thicker so she could hold it down better.
Another baby I got to meet was Moses who was almost 2. He hasn't started talking yet and the workers at the orphanage don't know why, but he was always smiling and was just the happiest baby you've ever seen. We did a craft with the kids with beads and when we were cleaning up, Moses started picking up all the beads off of the floor one by one and put them back in the bottle we had. It was so precious.
A third baby I got to meet was Kyrie. She had the curliest black hair and the biggest eyes you've ever seen. She was so happy to play on the play set. She must have been almost 3. She held onto the monkey bars I held her up to and she could swing there by herself. She surprised me by how strong she was and she kept pulling herself up too, like she was trying to do chin ups! It was the craziest thing to watch this little baby act like a body builder up there on those bars. She wasn't afraid of anything.
Something that caught my attention was just the range of ethnicities in the orphanage. There were kids who looked African American and had accents that sounded almost Jamaican, and then there were mixed kids ranging from really light, to really dark, and then there were some kids who looked Honduran, or Latino. But they all played together and helped each other out so well. I didn't see anyone start a fight or get into an argument. They were so well behaved.
Even though they didn't have much, they loved life and just played to their hearts content and just wanted to be loved. Whenever I would hold one of them, like Luis, who looked Honduran, he would just grab hold of my neck and hug me and he smiled so much and was so full of energy and life! I loved it. I wish we could go back another time as well!