Free At Last!
June 10, 2020
The Lockdown at Neema Village is over and the President says Tanzania is free at last from Corona! That is such a relief to know! With 60 babies on campus and a large staff caring for them it was a rough time with almost a hundred people including the babies, volunteer directors, five cows and a hundred chickens locked in at Neema Village! The nannies were overjoyed to finally be able to go home!
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(ATT: We added a large group of new addresses to our email list this month so if you are receiving this email for the first time it is because at some point last year you donated to Neema Village. We wanted you to know how your money is being spent.)
If you are new to the blog let me quickly tell you what we do at Neema Village. We are a baby rescue center for abandoned, orphaned and at-risk babies in Tanzania. We only take babies two years old and under. And let me tell you babies are just plain expensive! So thank you for your gift to Neema Village!
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The Arusha Social Welfare sends babies to Neema Village that have been orphaned by the death of their mother, abandoned, or at-risk babies (born with conditions that they would not survive in the villages, like Loitapuaki being read to to by Ashley Berlin from Casper Wyoming). One in 22 moms die in childbirth in sub-Sahara Africa. Shocking isn’t it! When a mom dies the children have a drastically reduced chance of surviving to age five.
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Baby Phillip, who lost his mother, was 3 months old and weighed only 3.3 lbs when he was brought in to Neema. He is still on oxygen so please keep praying for him. Every time our daughter Bekah tries to take him off, his oxygen level goes back down. Neema bought a $2,000. oxygen tank to keep him alive during the lockdown since no one could go out to refill our smaller tanks. Way to go Neema Village, this is what saving babies is all about.
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The first week open after Covid, one of our sweetest babies was adopted! Little Mason, above, was an abandoned baby and a couple from Dar es Salaam had been looking to adopt him. Some of our babies have been left on roadsides, in a gravel pit, by the river, a bus station bench, a latrine, in the grass. etc. Mason’s mother left him outside a health center and the police were called to pick him up. We were just loving him until his new mom and dad could get here.
They could not wait for the lockdown to end so they could get in to see him. This week they were able to come in and hold him. They spent a few days with him, feeding him his bottle, changing him and getting him to bed. They were a pretty excited couple as they flew off to Dar with their new son. Neither Neema Village nor Social Welfare accept money for adoptions.
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Two other abandoned babies are being looked at and paper work is being done to adopt them. Austin, above, and Patric, below, will be the next ones to be adopted. Such cute babies who will soon have their forever families. Praise God they will never be abandoned again.
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So Neema Village is back to doing what it does best.
In addition to the 59 babies on campus now, there are 71 full time employees at Neema Village. Only Tanzanians are paid a salary at Neema Village in Tanzania. We like that and I think you will too. Hard working nanny below with three babies. This is what happens when we don’t have volunteers!!
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Stay with us for the next few emails and we will tell you about our small business program for moms called MAP (Mothers Against Poverty) helping women who have been abused and abandoned and our outreach program to help the poor, and the Neema Village Day Care for Handicap Babies and the Water Well drilling project. God is busy at Neema Village!
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All of this is done, not by us, but by the Abundant Grace of God. Michael and I are just two retired people who love what God is doing in Tanzania, East Africa. If you want to do something that matters, that makes a lasting difference in this world join us in the work at Neema Village. Thank you for supporting this precious work in Arusha, Tanzania.
And come see us, I think you will fall in love with Africa and the moms and babies at Neema Village too!
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