First trip to Home of Hope

I will try to describe my experience so that you can feel as though you are there....You beep your car horn for the gate keeper to open the gate and when you pull in you see a statue of Mary in a small garden. There is a larger garden behind the smaller one. To the right is an office, to the left is the building where all the children are. As you turn around…to the right of the gate are the stairs that lead you down to the rooms of children. The first section seems to be classrooms of some sort…I saw older children in those…then as you continue down the stairs you begin to hear more baby sounds. There is a door that opens to a long dark hallway. It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust. Then you go to the second door on the right and walk into a blue room with about 50 blue, meta,l basinet sized cribs all lined up in the center of the room. There are windows on only one wall of the room so it is dimly lit. There is a long changing table set up on the window wall. To the left of the changing table are about 4 or 5 larger cribs with older/toddlers. The back wall is where there are 2 or 3 super sized cribs where all the older infants go to play while their bedding gets changed…they also are fed their solid food while sitting against the rails with their legs dangling through the bars. The wall opposite the window also has about 6 larger cribs. And the wall opposite the super-sized cribs in a wall full of closets and storage of baby clothes and blankets, etc. I would say that there were about 5 women that helped take care of all the babies. I saw those babies get bathed and fed and rubbed with lotion every morning. They got clean sheets and blankets every day. Some workers were playful and loving, others were more reserved and less affectionate. But I did feel that the children received decent care and most babies were thriving and responded to my voice and made eye contact and smiled and played with their toys. Each crib has a toy tied across the top.
It is my understanding that many of the nuns on staff are registered nurses so they do get good medical care. They do get some immunizations at the orphanage and they seemed to have a good supply at the time of antibiotics, Tylenol, advil, etc. The biggest issue that I could see was DIAPERS!!! They used torn bed sheets that absorbed nothing!