Once abandoned, life gave abandoned babies a second chance

Mary Beckenham of Newlife Home in Nairobi has taken care of thousands of abandoned babies

Mary Beckenham vividly remembers the Sunday in 1991 when she stopped by a newsstand on her way home from church with her family and bought a copy of the Sunday Standard. Flipping through, she came across a story with the headline, ‘Thirty Five HIV-positive Babies Abandoned at Kenyatta National Hospital’.

“I read the story and felt a strong urge to do something about it,” she says. “I couldn’t believe that such young and innocent souls could be abandoned by their parents.”

Being a woman of faith, Beckenham’s motherly instinct kicked in, provoking her to “do something about it”. It was her third year staying in Kenya. She recalls that before she relocated to Kenya, she had promised herself she would start a home for orphaned and abandoned children in Africa. The story she read in the paper proved to be the impetus she needed to actualise her dream of giving such children – born and left for dead– a second chance to live.

Through New Life Home Trust, Beckenham has not only given abandoned children a chance to live; she has given hundreds of them a chance to experience real family life through adoption.
“Most of our children are rescued. They have been born and dumped. Sometimes we receive orphaned children who are abandoned on the streets. Most of the children we meet face grim situations,” says Guy Bestable, the manager of New Life, himself an adopted child.
Since the inception of the home, Beckenham has seen children under her care transition into new adoptive families locally and abroad. “We receive yearly reports from their foster parents and their stories are incredible. The first ones to have been adopted through New Life are either in the university studying or about to graduate,” she says.

Her own adopted son is 21 and has had quite a normal upbringing. Perhaps, the only telling sign that he is an adopted child would be the colour of his skin when compared to his parents who are both white. “The first time we met our son, he was a small child who was sick,” Beckenham says. “He was fragile, weak and in bad state. His doctor told me that he was going to die - that his chances of survival were almost zero.” Nevertheless she decided to take him in and adopted him. She nursed him as he continued to receive treatment. The rest is history. Mark is alive today and happy that fate gave him a loving family with Mary and her husband.

Mary points out that the trend of adoption is gaining momentum in Kenya today. “Out of every 10 children who are adopted from New Life, four are by a Kenyan couple, four by Kenyan single mothers and two by couples from overseas,” she says.

Susan Shimba falls into the single women category. She is a happy mother of three: Daphine, Solomon and Lucky. “They all make me happy. They define who I am and are the epicentre of my life,” Shimba says.

Had she decided to live with her daughter as an only child, life would have been relatively normal. Her status, however, as a mother of one, changed when she bumped into Solomon and Lucky at New Life.

“At the time, my daughter was a volunteer at the home and I had just decided to pay her an impromptu visit. As I walked through the rooms and met these children who were abandoned, I felt that they too needed a place to call home: parents, brothers and sisters they could associate with,” she says. She could tell that there were more boys than girls at the home. Apparently, as it turned out on inquiry, couples from Kenya who adopted children from the home preferred girls to boys because “friends and family are weary of inheritance issues when boys grow up”.

Shimba, however, had made up her mind. She wanted two boys: Solomon and Lucky. In a photo portrait of the family, it would be difficult to tell that the two boys are adopted. The love and concern she has for her brood of three children seems genuine and natural.

As we continue the conversation, I learn that Solomon, one of her adopted sons, suffers from cerebral palsy. The emotional connection between the adopted boys and their ‘new’ mother is very strong.“ I didn’t adopt him because he had cerebral palsy,” she explains, adding: “Nor did that part of his life deter me from accepting him. I knew I loved Solomon from the moment I set my eyes on him. And even though he is not biologically mine, what I feel for him isn’t any different from what I feel for his sister, Daphine.”

Though Solomon received good care provided to him by the home, Shimba believes he is in the family that God meant for him to be part of. She says that she understood that it would require more than just a motherly instinct to care for Solomon and attend to his needs. Today, four years after the adoption of the two boys were finalised, both seem fine and happy at home with their mother and older sister. It’s a unique family – united by fate and one woman’s love for two abandoned boys. When they grow up and get to understand their history, Solomon and Lucky will be thankful.

Mirjam Diethelm is a 17-year-old Swiss of Kenyan origin. “I’m so thankful to be part of my family,” she says when I ask about her adoptive parents. “I know I am an adopted child but my parents have never given me any reason to doubt that they truly care for me.” Her mother abandoned her at KNH. The hospital would later transfer Mirjam to New Life Home to be cared for by Beckenham. It is around the same time that a couple from Switzerland visited the organisation in search for a baby. “My mother had a desire to have a daughter. For a baby girl, my father wanted Mirjam – and that is where I got my name,” says Mirjam, in an email.

Today, Mirjam, having completed her basic education, works as an intern at a professional child care centre in Switzerland, perhaps because of her own history as an adopted child. Her parents would later travel back to New Life to get her a baby brother.

“My dream is to finish my professional training then become a flight attendant and travel around the world,” she says.

Mirjam admits that she ‘regrets’ knowing “little of the Kenyan culture,” the land of her origin. However, she believes adoption of children should be cherished for its sheer goodness. “It is the right of every child to have parents. Otherwise I would be an orphan,” she says.

Though adoption is like a slow-moving train in Kenya, recent times have seen even public figures take in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. What disheartens, notes Shimba, is the views of most Kenyans towards adoption: “One time my son was taken to a hospital and somehow they discovered that he is an adopted child. They expected to see a white woman go for him.” The doctors were evidently fazed by the prospect of an African woman adopting a disabled child – or maybe just having the heart to adopt. That, in Shimba’s opinion, ought to change.