Parentless

We moved in here 3 months ago expecting the construction to be done in a month.

There's not much I can do about it but blog it so here it goes.

    A lot has happened in the last 4 months. Mercy and I are Back in India and today the girls all come back from the homes we put them in while we were in the states. When it's all said and done we don't have any more money now then we did before left and our ability to buy land and build a permanent home for the orphanage is no closer then it was a year ago.

Still on the job hunt. Downturn in the economy has put a pretty good dent in the short-term contract market. Looks like we may be back here longer then we first thought.

We are back stateside for a few months. We have decided to expand the work and have returned to the states to see if we can save up some money for a larger facilite.

Shoba - Her story and her song ===============================

Shoba is seven year old. We still remember the day she walked into our home with her guardian. She was very sad and quiet. It did not take a long time to figure out that she was carrying a deep hurt within her. Her father passed away when she was very young and since her mother was in a depression and had no job, she couldn't take care of her daughter. So she decided to drop shoba at a relative's house.

Her relatives started mistreating the girl, getting her to do all the domestic chores and also sending her to the local toddy shop (liquor) to buy toddy everyday.

The mother heard about these things but couldn't do anything about it because she had already got married to another man. Her new husband abandoned her within a few months when she was pregnant with twins and never returned.

This was Shoba's situation when she moved in with us.

But Shoba has started going to school and found couple of friends and...

When Devayani moved in with us, we took her to the doctor for vaccination and medical check-up. During the check-up, the doctor found out that she had split sounds in her heart beat and referred us to a cardiologist. After going through few tests, echo-cardiograph and the scan, we found out that she had a hole in her heart referred to as Atrial Septal Defect (ASD). It is a birth heart defect. Because of ASD, extra blood passes into the lungs causing higher pressure thus damaging the lungs.

Because the hole was big, open heart surgery was her only option. We got her admitted to the hospital on 3rd August. The hospital wanted us to bring Devayani’s mother to sign the consent papers. But tracking her down was a nightmare. She refused to come to the hospital because she had to cook for her son who is 20 yrs old.  We finally convinced her to go to the hospital and sign the papers. She seemed very upset with her daughter because of her medical condition. She told her daughter that she delivered 8 babies  and...

One of our girls had to go in for heart surgery. She's out of surgery and doing fine.

 A new year has come. Looking back on the last year feels better then it used to knowing your having an impact makes a lot of difference. But to be perfectly honest that doesn't mean there aren't days I wish I didn't have nearly 20 people dependent on my paycheck.