Carlos; the baby in the bag.

Imagine yourself walking along the sidewalks of Comayagua. You see a plastic trash bag on the sidewalk ahead of you. It sits on the walk in front of a church. You are curious. What's in it? Maybe something of value that you could reuse or sell. You stop, lift it. It doesn't weigh much. Less than five pounds. You open it. Inside is a newborn baby, it's cut umbilical cord still attached lying in it's own afterbirth. The baby is barely breathing...if at all. He has been in the closed bag long enough to have used up most of the air his little lungs need to sustain life. He is catatonic. What should I do, you ask. Will he even live? Maybe you should just reclose the bag and walk on. No, your heart has been touched by the terribleness of what has happened. You lift the little bundle in your arms and seek help.

This is Carlos Benjamin. And that is his story.

As soon as the person who found him took him to the IHNFA center, they hurried him to the hospital. He was having trouble breathing. The next day he was transferred to Hopital Escuela in Tegucigalpa where he spent the next nineteen days of his life.

On the nineteenth day, I received a call from the IHNFA office begging us to take Carlos for "just" a few days while they tried to find an NGO or home who would take him. Barbe and I agreed, of course. I mean really, what else as Christians could we do, and so we waited in Comayagua all afternoon for Carlos to arrive from Teguc.

He was so thin. And tiny. And his little ribs stood out. And he was very quiet.  

Carlos' story is not really all that unique here. I hear of the same thing happening all too often in Teguc or San Pedro. I wonder who Carlos' mother is. Is she a prostitute and Carlos was just part of the cost of doing business? Another casualty on an already long list of the same. Maybe she is a young teenager, too afraid of the consequences and realities of keeping a baby. Or a mother with already to many mouths she can't feed.

I am learning not to judge other's actions too harshly. I have never been in the shoes of a young, pregnant, teenage girl or a mother of ten who cannot feed those she has. BUT, I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone, no matter what the circumstances, could throw a baby out as trash. 

Unfathomable and unimaginable is such an action to me.

More than two weeks later, Carlos is putting on weight. His cheeks have filled out and his little, stick like legs are getting meat on them. He very clearly let's us know when he is hungry...which is most of the time. He is getting lots of love. He is very popular with the ladies. Last weekend we attended a missions conference and we rarely saw him, unless it was seeing him being cuddled and loved on by one of the women.

Our boys are going to be great dad's. That is obvious. They do their part, holding him, feeding and changing him. Both Thomas and Ben have taken care of him at night, feeding him every couple of hours, letting Barbe and me catch up on sleep.  I am proud of them.

Thomas and Carlos

I do not know how much longer we will have him, but I suspect it is going to be awhile. IHNFA is being dissolved and a new department, DINAF, is being formed. Everything is on hold. The paid foster family program is being discontinued and only the unpaid, like us, will remain. The news coming from the new agency is that they want NGOs and churches to take on the huge burden of orphan and foster care in Honduras. I see disaster looming in the not too distant future. 

The need for foster families is huge. 

Children should be in families. How I want to see more families, Honduran and otherwise, step up and fill this need. I understand the cost involved to feed a child, to buy pampers and formula. I understand the risk of losing one's heart to this child, only to have him one day taken from you. But really, what else can we as Christians do? Can we leave a baby, abandoned by his mother, to just...just what?

It is more than likely that we will receive another call from IHNFA soon. 

They told me yesterday that there is another baby, a little girl, who will be leaving the hospital soon...with no place to go. Barbe and I are trying as best we can to do our part, to live out our faith. But, I know this; we cannot personally take care of every abandoned baby we are asked to give a home to. 

Sometimes I wish we were part of an organization with access to donors and funding. If I had the funds, I would go through the legal requirements to start a transition home. It would be a home to receive babies until foster families could be located. It would not be a long-term care facility. I would find a Honduran lady, maybe with a couple of children of her own who needs the work, rent a house for them to live in, furnish it with what they need and set up a nursery with several cribs. Here would be a safe place to receive abandoned babies, a safe place until a family willing to foster them could be found or until they can be adopted. It would not cost very much to do such a thing.

This is what is in my heart to do...if I had your help.