6 New Babies

The names of the babies in the following story have been removed to protect their privacy. Sorry for the vagueness, and lack of congruity to other stories.
In the past three weeks we have received 6 new babies at the shelter. I will briefly tell you about each one. I don’t have time right now to add pictures, but I will later, so please check back to this post.
Baby 1 (we can't give names for privacy reasons) is around 18 months old and was brought here in the middle of the night about 3 weeks ago. She had been found abandoned in a tavern at 2 am. She is a beautiful little girl with a wonderful smile, but for the first few days she was here she was very withdrawn and would not laugh or smile at anyone. She was old enough to know that her world had been turned upside down. Her mother was found, and has been imprisoned for abandoning her. She has grown much more comfortable in the shelter and is now happy and smiles and laughs all of the time.
Baby 2 came a few days later, I think that her mother died and there was no one left to care for her. She is 1 year old and is very sick.
I have already written about the next baby that came, Baby 3. Every day she improves.
On the day before Easter when we were preparing for the Easter party, Baby 4 arrived. His mother had been continually leaving him in the care of his older siblings, and his grandma decided that this time would be the last. I was in the room while Janis got all of the information from his grandma, and the entire time he just grinned at me. He is a cute little guy with a laugh that sounds like he is grunting. I am so thankful that that the Lighthouse Shelter was able to take him in, but it breaks my heart to know that his siblings are still out there somewhere being left alone on a regular basis. His grandma thought that he was born either in April or July of last year.
Tuesday I went with Michelle and Kaitlin to the government hospital to pick up a 2 week old baby girl named baby 5. Her mother signed her away at birth. She was in a room with about 8 other babies, 4 in incubators. In one of the incubators was a baby that was so tiny, it did not even look like a real baby. The baby was only hooked up to an IV with fluids; the other babies in incubators were hooked up to nothing at all. I have been in NICU’s in the US with friends of mine who had their babies being cared for there. It is so different here, not only in the quality of care, but also in the fact that we just breezed right into a room full of sick and dying babies without washing our hands or even having to really explain who we were. Baby 5 has an umbilical hernia (which is alarmingly common here) and may have some other health problems as well. She is a sweet and cuddly little thing.
Yesterday the police brought us a new baby who was 1 or 2 days old - her umbilical cord was still soft and wet when she arrived. She was found abandoned at the gates of a retirement center (which is called the Old Age Home) with a bag of towels and diapers. I can’t even imagine what must be going on in a mother’s head to go through 9 months of pregnancy, labor and delivery only to leave her newborn baby shortly after birth. Thankfully she was found in time and brought to us. She is a sweet little baby and she seems to be healthy.
The shelter has never had this many babies and children before. We are running very close to what we are licensed for, and we will have to start turning children away. Now, more then ever before there is a critical need for us to expand in order to allow more room for all of the children in need. We are also only licensed to take children up to 6 years old. We have several long term children close to that age. It is the dream and goal of the Betzers to open up foster care homes for these children who will be with us for the rest of their lives. Please pray that we can get the funding and land we need so that the shelter will not have to start turning children away.