New Kids

This is an entry from Mandy's blog on Sept 5, 2008


It has been a long time since I´ve written anything, since things have been so busy! I have been back in Guatemala since the beginning of August. I finally got the last of the legal work done and I now have four babies in the nursery. Levi was the first baby I recieved, and he was 7 days old when I got him. He is about 3 weeks old now. His mom had an affair while her husband was in the States working, and she had Levi. Now her husband is coming back and she doesn´t want him to find out so she gave Levi up. He is about the cutest thing I have ever seen.Alejandra is 3 months old. She is a fatty but she is cute too. She had an older brother and 3 cousins come here with her, who live downstairs. Their story is a little scary. Both of their families were living in the same house together, and all of their parents were part of a gang. I read in the newspaper about the gang, and what they do is they kidnap people and then they tie them up and negotiate with them how they want to die. Within the next 48 hours they kill them and leave them in public places for everyone to see. So the parents had kidnapped this little 3 year old girl, and they were keeping her hostage in the house for money from her family. Last Thursday the police broke into their house and killed all of the parents, in order to rescue the little girl. The scary thing was that all their kids were in the house and saw their parents die. The good thing is that I don´t think the kids know what their parents were doing.Paola is about 1 year old (we´re not sure) and her dad was a gang leader. One day her brother and sister were left alone at home with her, and I´m not sure how it happened but their house caught on fire. Their parents never came home for them and the older brother took care of her and her sister on the streets for a few months before the police found them and brought them here. Her brother and sister live downstairs. Jose is about 1 year old as well. His dad beat him so badly that when we found him he was in the hospital with broken ribs. He still has dark bruises all over his back, and he has been here for almost a month. There were 2 other newborn babies. They died last week. One of them was premature and the other was really sick. That was really hard. I am still so sad about it. But one of the hard things about this is that we never know what kind of condition the babies are going to be in. There are a lot of sad things that we have to deal with, but I still love it here. It is worth everything to be able to take care of the babies and the kids that have been abandoned and to give them the love they deserve. Since I´ve gotten here we also hired someone to be the caregiver for the babies while I am gone. She has started already and she has been awesome. I know she will do a great job.