Thank you for volunteering at Neema!
Michael and I hope you had a blast while you were volunteering at Neema Village this year! I know we always do! Our babies and staff love volunteers who come to hold babies and help around the houses. They ask about you after you leave and we miss you!
May God Bless you for giving of your time and money to come and love some of the neediest children on the planet. One of you even bought an elephant for the children this year!
All of you brought gifts in your many suitcases and they probably felt like you had packed an elephant! This group, pictured below, brought 17 suitcases! Still cannot believe we got them all on top of the van!
We know that for each one of you that was a sacrifice and we want you to know that we know and we appreciate that so much. More importantly God knows of your gifts and the hearts of love that you brought with them. May God just richly bless you for that!
Aren’t our babies beautiful! No matter how they come to us abandoned or preemie after just a few weeks with us they are fat and happy. But remember, they have all lost the most important thing to a baby, their mothers. Babies in Africa who lose their mothers, have only a one in ten chance of survival so we are thankful that we can increase the survival rate of these precious babies at Neema. (below a Safe Childbirth seminar taught by two awesome volunteers from Montana.)
We truly appreciate everything you have done for these babies and the strong hearted women of Africa. From teaching a women’s class, fund raising, changing a dirty diaper to just reading to your readers, we are so thankful for you.
We hope you had a good time. Most of our volunteers are sad to leave and many even ask, “Can we stay and live here!” We wish you could but unfortunately the Tanzanian government prefers that we hire Tanzanians to do our work and does periodically ask NGOs to justify hiring non-Tanzanians. Thankfully due to God’s Grace we are still able to tell them we do not hire non Tanzanians!
We hope you have made it home safely and have some wonderful memories of your time in Africa. We would love to hear some of your best stories and see some of the pictures of your stay at Neema and who was your favorite baby! I tell people, yes, I have a favorite baby, it is the one I am holding at the moment! Osiligi and Nengai are two that I hold a lot!
Please continue to follow the Neema story on the Neema Village Facebook page as well as our personal Facebook pages, Michael Fortson or Dorris Fortson. Send me a friend request and I promise I will accept so you can get our monthly blog.
In case you didn’t know, we operate solely by private donations, we do not accept money from the Tanzanian government, Social Welfare, for adoptions nor from the US government and we must work constantly to find sponsors for our babies to keep the home running. We are not a “dirt floor” orphanage as you well know and must maintain certain standards for our babies.
We may look wealthy but we are not and we beg for every dollar.
Since the beginning of Neema, to best of my count, only twelve of our 120 babies have ever been fully sponsored. Just a few were over sponsored. Some of our babies lived at Neema for two years and were adopted or returned home without ever having had a single sponsor! God was gracious and took care of us anyway.
Sponsorships for Neema children start at $30 USD per month but it cost us approximately $300 USD per month to keep a baby at Neema. We take our monthly expenses: nannies salaries, food, formula, utilities, medical costs, petrol, etc. and divide that by the number of babies for that month. It fluctuates some each month depending on medical bills or car repairs but generally averages around $300 to $400 USD per month.
Only our Tanzanian Neema staff are paid a salary from Neema donations. All our “Wazungu” (directors) are either retired with their own income or they have raised their own support from their friends and family. So please remember the babies and when “your ship comes in” remember that little baby home where you volunteered in Africa. We need your help!
(Volunteers Kim, Emily and Rachel above went to the hospital to pick up an abandoned baby.)
It is easy to set up a sponsorship on the website: www.neemavillage.org/how-to-help
Just click on the donate button and fill in the blanks. If you are not in the US please don’t fill in your address, it just confuses our poor donate program. If you have problems sitting that up, let me know, we can help
Also, if you are active in a church, please share your experiences with your pastor and let him/her know of our need. We love to go to churches and tell the Neema story. (Volunteers below on their way to church with the big kids.)
If you are already sponsoring a baby – Thank You! Thank You!
Once again thank you so much for coming our way and being part of the Neema Family! We hope that it made you as happy as it did Debbie Chai in the picture below.
May God bless you with His Abundant Grace and Mercy and Love,
Michael and Dorris Fortson
Founders and Executive Directors of Neema House/Village.
This little girl was found crying on the side of a busy road. She had been there a good part of the day when people finally realized no one was watching or coming for her. She continued to cry, scream actually, for three or four days at Neema before she finally settled down. When these little ones are old enough to remember their mother it is so much harder for them. I just cannot imagine what they must go through before we get them. 
This little newborn pictured on the right, was born on Feb 17, 2017. She was abandoned at the hospital. We were told the mother had threatened to take her to the river. Thank God she did not do that. I got to name her and chose the name Bethany. Bethany is beautiful and is such a good baby. I know that mothers everywhere love their babies and it must have been something very tragic to make this mother leave her baby. We are too busy loving and caring for these babies to take time to judge a mother who felt she had no other choice than to walk away from this beautiful little newborn. Neema is “A Place of Forgiveness and Hope.” Forgiveness for the moms and hope for the babies. Please say a prayer for that mom.
One of our sweet volunteers from Billings, Montana got to go with Bekah to pick up baby Bethany. It was an experience Emily Broadbent will never forget. I love this picture of Emily smiling through her tears.
Faith is about 20 months old. Her mother, suffering from substance abuse, has repeatedly abandoned her. She has an uncle who would take her but the current drought has left him barely able to feed his family. The interesting thing that happened with this baby is that the uncle who lived all the way across town had been told about Neema but did not know how to get to us. Arusha is a very big city with 1.6 million people. The uncle got on a dala dala (the local transport system) to try to find us. He sat next to a lady and asked her if she knew how to get to a place called Neema Village. The lady was Orupa, one of our nannies who was on her way to work. Now how sweet is that! 
Faith is very lethargic and we have had her to the doctor to make sure there is nothing wrong. She was limp, not eating and lay on the floor with her face to the wall, even during song time when the other toddlers in the room were singing and dancing to “The wheels on the bus.” It was scary. Yesterday Bekah was able to get her to eat a little Ugali with some liquid vitamins so she seemed a bit more alert last night before bed. We have never seen a baby so despondent. It is very sad, please pray for little Faith.
Born at 29 weeks gestation, tiny baby Joanne, named by the nannies, weighed 2.2 lbs when she was born on Dec 17, 2016. Both the father and mother are extremely ill with HIV and left the baby at the hospital. The hospital called and said she was finally big enough to come home to Neema. She is very precious and we will have to see what the future holds for this little one. We definitely need your help to care for all these new babies. Bless you if you are already sponsoring a Neema baby. If not, why not? There is so much sadness in the world an abandoned baby should not be one of them. 
We have had three of our babies able to go home this month. Sweet boy Rusty got to go home to an auntie. His mother had left him with his father and the father had abandoned him. When the mother learned of this she told her sister that she had a baby at Neema Village and if she wanted him she should go get him. Rusty loves everybody and was just fine as he and his aunt pulled out of the drive at Neema. He was waving to us. The auntie has invited us to visit him anytime.
Asha Bella’s mom died at her birth and her dad has now remarried. The new mom came and spent a few days diapering and feeding Asha and has fallen in love with her. We are so happy for this little baby and her new mom.
Angel is a quiet shy 2 year old that we have had since she was abandoned at a few months old. She was finally able to return home with an aunt this week. Her mother has had some mental problems but Social Welfare has now granted the Aunt permission to take Angel home. Angel has cuddled up very nicely with her Aunt who has said we could visit her any time. We like that.So babies coming and going has made for an exciting month at Neema.
Our daughter Kim and her Montana group wanted to go out to the village to see him. They took food, blankets, clothing and of course Carol Wald’s soccer balls. I had made the trip a couple of weeks ago so I was excited for them to see Joshua and his home.They told us, it was a hot, dusty trip through rocky gullies and they were not sure the big van would make it. They did make it but had to walk in to the village the last part of the way when the van could not go any further.
The Masaai love their cattle, they live off their cattle and count their wealth by how many cows they have. The Masaai are famous warriors of the old days of Tanganyika and claim to have never lost a battle. They are very tall people and would raid other tribes and capture their tall women. For hundreds of years their young men had to kill a lion single handed to become a man. Of course, since there are very few lions left outside the game parks now, they have stopped that ritual. But it is interesting that they still bring their cattle into the middle of the village at night into a boma, a thorn fence, to keep out the lions.
And they still do their traditional Masaai dance which tells their stories of killing lions, their battles of conquests and how they bargain their cows for a new bride.
Angel is our social worker and part of her job is to check on our babies who have returned home. We do take trips out to see them ourselves too and are always so excited to see how well they are doing.
he told how we are all now bound together because Neema saved Joshua’s life. He said, “When my wife died it was very bad for us because we had no way to take care of him and no way to pay for his care. But you took him in and now he is a big strong boy. That is Joshua’s dad standing by Michael and talking to the Montana group in the picture below.
He said, “We see Neema House as our family and Babu Michael and Bibi Dorris as our grandparents because they did a great thing which we could not repay. My father, (picture below) says thank you, thank you a lot and your family is now our family.”
Then the head momma spoke and said, “Neema House was an angel of Joshua. We are one big family now and today our tummies will be full of food because you brought gifts to us. Many people are getting a blessing today because of Joshua. Now let God go with you. Our gate is always open for you.”
In trying to communicate with you and say things in more meaningful ways, I’m always on the lookout for a good word. But words are slippery, they can change on you. They can become something totally different over time, like “cool.” Perfectly good words, like “cherish”, get lost in the tons of verbage thrown at us every day. When was the last time you heard someone say “I cherish you.” Words can dissolve into meaninglessness (is that a word?) by overuse like “awwwwesome”. They can lose their punch when we begin to “love” too many things like toothpaste or a pair of shoes. It’s hard to find a good word nowadays.
But Hope, ahhh Hope, now hope is still a good word. Unless it has something tacked on like “less or lessness.” We had a sign above the door at the old Neema House that read “A Place of Forgiveness and Hope.” We still are, but I miss the sign. I loved telling folks we are a place of Hope for the babies we keep and Forgiveness for the moms who had lost all hope. When we lose Hope, “Life is a broken winged bird.” It will never fly. We need Hope. We can never have too much Hope.
Without Christ working within us we have no hope of making this work. And without major help I think we are all in the same boat, we are all too inadequate. We need what Paul talks about in Colossians 1: 27 “Christ in us, the hope of glory.”
I have just finished baking my traditional Italian Cream Cake, in honor of our daughter Bekah who lives in Africa. I’ll eat an extra piece for you, love! And to my three sisters – the cake had no soap in it! (They know the story of a Thanksgiving past when we had to put a whole beautifully perfect cake down the garbage disposal!) Quite often this year Michael and I have been hit with huge doses of thankfulness. People like you, who have encouraged us in this precious ministry of saving abandoned, orphaned and at risk babies in Africa, you make me all mushy in my heart with thankfulness!
who have sacrificed and taken on the big projects of building Neema Village; the widows home, the baby center, the new volunteer home, the school/church, the mothering center and the two homes for our unadoptable children. You take my breath away!
We could not do this work without you. When we hold these
babies, we know it is your arms too that hold them. It is your love that cares for them. It is you who help us diaper and feed and cuddle them. It is beyond thrilling to see how God’s immeasurable Grace has touched the hearts of His people to help in this incredible work. We are thankful. That is great helpers Kent and Joan Smith from Fort Worth, TX below.
I am so thankful that we have been privileged to administer God’s grace to the 118 babies who have been helped by Neema Village over the past four years.
We thank God we were there for the little identical twins, Aneth and Alice above, abandoned by their mother and father and who came to Neema just a few weeks ago. The nannies keep fingernail polish on one of them to tell them apart!
I’m eternally grateful that our daughter Bekah (pictured below) is there helping with the medical needs of the babies, taking them to the doctor, checking their daily meds and making their charts.
And for our incredible staff of 43 Tanzanians, I just cannot say enough about these hard-working men and women. And I am grateful that a young family from Searcy, Arkansas, Jonathon and Whitney Striclyn (Pictured below with their new baby) have applied and been accepted by the board to come next year to handle the spiritual needs of Neema.
If you are having trouble giving thanks this year remember he didn’t say we have to feel thankful in every circumstances only to give thanks and it is not hypocritical to give thanks when you don’t feel thankful. It is faith to give thanks when you feel nothing.
helpful for the teacher and could sing the Tanzanian National Anthem along with the other children. Jenny, a volunteer, is helping Tumi the registered teacher at Neema in the picture. They are doing colors and counting and Bahati is laughing and laying on the floor in the middle. 
These little children are not able to take a bath every night in a tub full of water. Can you imagine how good that would feel for these two dusty little boys. Women walk 3 to 5 miles a day to get water to drink and make their food. Our trips out to the villages to check on babies who have returned home or to take food to our outreach babies like the twins (below) can make you long for a tall cool glass of water.
Shivers the mind doesn’t it! Most water in our part of Africa is full of E. coli and chloroform bacteria and the water from our well seems to have more than its share of those two ornery organisms. So we are trying to treat the water with two systems, one to purify the water and one to take out the excess Fluoride which would make our babies have brown teeth. For the tiny babies we still use bottled water that we order from the store in large 10 gallon jugs. Since our well is located at the bottom of the hill in the banana grove and not on our fenced property, we had to buy a small plot of land in the middle of a neighbor’s banana field to drill the well. Women wash clothes in the ditch close to our well site. You can just barely see the water in the ditch but its there and the woman in the picture to the right is getting her clothes amazingly clean.
Our new home is located inside the city limits of Arusha but there is no water delivery to homes in our area. There are a couple of spigots that stick up out of the ground at the bottom of the hill where the city turns on the water a few days a week. The women gather around with their buckets and haul water on their heads to their homes.
Neema comes to the rescue! We are now sharing our water from the well with the local villagers. We have placed two 2,000 liter tanks in the village and are so grateful to those of you who helped us get the well so that we could share the water with our neighbors. I know the village women are grateful too.
It is beginning to be hard to answer the question “Where do you live?” We try to spend six months a year here at Neema Village with the babies and then six months at home telling folks about the babies. Our hearts are firmly planted in both places! 
The long dreaded moving day went off without too many hitches, at least we didn’t have any babies left behind. We moved the baby home and the volunteer home in two days. That’s 2 kitchens, 9 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms, 5 refrigerators, 50 baby beds, a couple hundred baby bottles, 16 adult beds, 6 couches, 2 stoves, food, formula, furniture, sterilizers, clothes, toys, curtains, pictures, and a partridge in a pear tree. Oh and 46 precious little ones! That is surely a record in some book somewhere!!
Volunteers each took one of the small babies to keep calm on the move. The babies did great, not sure about those of us who went back to the old house to remove the signs. We have had 106 babies cared for out of that rented house which we had filled to the brim with so much laughter and tears over the last four years. Remembering the babies who have come and gone over the years from that home was a bit rough, like Maxine, Elliott, the tiny triplet girls and all the others. We had 21 adoptions and 21 return homes from that house. But we were crowded and it was time to move.
As usual in a new house, things didn’t work at first, toilets leaked, hot water heaters kept overloading the power, kids who thought bides were for squirting your friend in the face, the playground not finished and the biggest problem, “Where to put the trash!” The bides in the children’s bathrooms have thankfully been removed. Just a little too much culture for us.
They washed in big tubs and hung clothes on the fence line until we could get the washer and dryer hooked up. 
But even with the move, life went on at Neema. Some great volunteers came by to help like the John Bardini family from North Carolina. I would have never gotten the sign out front without the steady hands of this good doctor. 
She fell in love with the babies and when she returned home she decided to do something to help. She decided to build a house for our unadoptable children. Even though we have had 21 adoptions so far at Neema, we have seen that all our babies will not be able to return home or be adopted. Like Malikia who is blind and whom we’ve had since her birth. Mali is Maasai and would not have survived out in that harsh environment. 
That is Lovise with Eric who got engaged early one morning on the front porch of Neema. I came out to find her ecstatic and Eric, the romantic, leaning over the rail crying. Love it! I told them I wasn’t sure I could take much more of this sweetness!! 
I went out walking around our new neighborhood this afternoon and some neighborhood boys wanted to walk with me. Of course they did, I had candy! They had made a little rolling stick toy and were laughing and having fun the whole way 
They can make the cutest toys out of nothing and have just as much fun as if it were store bought. I thought you might like to see the home of one of our closest neighbors. That is Neema’s new green roof just peaking up in the back of this home below.
One of our Maasai babies, Nengai, whose mom died at her birth had a visit from her grandmother on Friday. The father’s new wife came with her. I asked the driver if she was twelve years old and he said no, she is eleven. Oh My!
