I Know I Said We Were Full But...

I guess it all depends on your definition of full—right?  We picked up baby #7 today from the hospital.  She is a precious little girl named Leah and she is 2 weeks old.  Her mother died at childbirth and left behind 4 other children.  Her aunt has been caring for her but she has 5 of her own and now she has to care for her dead sister’s 4 children too.  Life is definitely not easy here; so much death, poverty and hopelessness. 

We agreed to take her because I am working my nannies extra days and have 2 more nannies that will I will train this week and start next week.  My nannies are very happy to work the extra days because we pay them time and ½.  They will make 500 kwacha a day compared to 300 kwacha.  FYI, 500 kwacha is equal to $3.50.  It doesn’t sound like much but most of my nannies who worked as nannies elsewhere only made 3000k a month and we are paying 5000k a month.  They think they have struck it rich by working here.

Back to the baby…everyone, my children and my nannies were thrilled that we got another girl.  We were starting to think that we were a boy’s orphanage as we had 5 boys and 1 girl. She looks a lot like Bridget but just smaller.  She weighs 3 kg (6.6 lbs.) and is adorable.  I will try and post a picture tomorrow.

Now I can put all the pink baby clothes on her instead of the boys.  Here in Malawi they wear whatever clothes are available so they don’t understand our custom of putting pink on girls and blue on boys.  Generally the boys end up looking like girls and at their age it’s hard to tell what sex they are anyway.  In addition, they call the boys “she” as they don’t have a word in their language for “he” and “she.”  So all my boys are called “she” and are dressed in pink!