“Herding Chickens”
Poor Nanny Elizabeth, trying to get the big babies all on the same path for their morning walk is a bit like herding chickens! It’s never a dull moment at our home for abandoned, orphaned and at risk babies in Tanzania, East Africa.
That is the Montana House in the background where the big kids who are unadoptable now live. You can see our banana trees in the back that Julius planted last year. I think Jack Pape cleared this path for the children to walk. Thanks Babu Jack!
Although we are planning on buying chickens to have our own eggs in January, our beautiful, happy, funny babies are nothing like chickens! Below is Happiness at it’s best! Here for your enjoyment are some of my favorite happy pictures of Neema babies. Not your typical African orphanage is it? 
The babies above are Emmanuel, Jess, Malikia, Joeli, Osiligi, Dorothy with Taylor Wittel volunteer and Maria.
Could they be any cuter??
We are trying to pay for the paving for the walkways between the buildings at Neema Village this Christmas. The babies have always loved their morning walks but the new property on the side of the hill had no place for them to walk. To get these happy babies outside in their strollers on paved walk ways you can help us by buying a foot of path, six foot wide by 1 foot long at $30. It will make a unique gift for someone you can’t think of what to buy for Christmas. We will email you a gift certificate you can put in a card for your recipient.
Just go to www.neemavillage.org and click on donate. In the purpose line put “Pave the Way” and Wallah! You are done Shopping!
Glad we could help!
Love,
Michael and Dorris
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!
you will remember Phillip’s special story. He was very tiny when abandoned so he spent a couple of months in the hospital until he was big enough to bring home to Neema. We named him Phillip after Phillip Wood, the only American on the Malaysian flight that went down a couple of years ago. My sister, Lottie McCormack in Edmond Ok, and Phillip Wood’s mother were friends, pregnant at the same time and their two boys grew up together in Oklahoma and later were roommates at Oklahoma Christian. When Phillip’s plane went down Lottie called and asked if we would name a baby after Phillip.
So now the rest of the story. We blogged a few months or so ago about Phillip being adopted and this was our first trip out to check his new home. Simone, a volunteer and her mom, and Angel, our social worker and Mama Musa, the Neema Manager and I traveled the endless or so it felt, rocky path up the mountains for a visit to see how Phillip was doing. His new mom and dad met us as we drove up to the house.
The cement home was surrounded outside by bananas trees, flowers and chickens scratching in the yard, There was a car and a motorcycle at the house so his family seems more affluent than the average Tanzanian family. They graciously fed us snacks of boiled eggs and bananas.
On the way back from Phillip’s house we stopped to check in on another abandoned baby, Michael, all grown up now, and his adoptive family. Michael had been abandoned on a front porch and the people who found him adopted him, which happens fairly often. He now has grandparents, a dad, uncles, aunts and cousins who love him and he is in school.
The builders are cutting the stones for the retaining walls on the property. They are also making the paving stones right here on the Neema property for the walk ways and for some sections of the road.
Mr. Chandu, our contractor, and Matt Erdman, are the two men out there at the land every day making this happen. On any given day there are aroiund 50 men working on this project. Thanks guys!
The rooms for the babies are painted in soft yellows and blues and the big hall down the middle of the home is also yellow. Hopefully one day there will be pictures of animals, giraffe, zebra, elephant, etc. painted on the walls down low enough for the children to see as they run and play in this big hallway.
The kitchen has an island in the middle of the room and big burners on the counter for boiling the 30 litres of milk a day we need to feed these hungry babies. We estimate around a hundred bottles of milk are made at Neema a day! We will also be feeding our staff and volunteers out of this kitchen every day.
Mr. Chandu created the blue prints for the front steps leading up to the porch after Michael had emailed his hand drawn ideas for the steps before we got here last week. It will be beautiful with flower gardens to the sides of the rounded steps. I think the bottom step down is going to be a doosy though!
You might be interested to know that the workers eat at Neema village every day. Two women cook for them, usually rice and beans or like today, Ugali and a dipping sauce of meat and potatoes. They pour the Ugali (pictured to the right) out on big platters and all eat from the same plate with their fingers, just like we used to in the old days of Africa. It was quite delicious and the smoky kitchen just added to the flavor.
A few months ago a young couple began coming to visit Neema House Arusha and noticed this beautiful baby. Sifa was calm, pleasant, quick to smile, sweet tempered and with a gentle disposition. The volunteers and staff all fell in love with her. 
That is Lindsey on the left, a volunteer from Nacogdoches, with Sifa at the mountain church. We love taking the babies to church, dressing them up and putting bows in their hair, if they have hair! and on their cute little bald heads if they don’t!
day playing with her, changing diapers, dressing and feeding her. So last week when Sifa went home to live with them she was not afraid. We are so happy about that. Sometimes it works out this way, a few times babies are adopted by couples who don’t spend time with them. That is pretty rough on the baby. But Sifa’s new mom and dad did it right. We could not be happier for this precious baby and her new family. Once again what evil meant for bad, God meant for good. 
We try very hard to not judge these women who abandon their babies. It is difficult to understand what would make a mother do something like this. We know mothers everywhere love their babies. It must be something so drastic and traumatic that she feels she has no choice but to her lay her baby down and walk away. I cannot imagine the anguish in her heart as she does this.