E-mail sent on 18th January 2005

Dear Susan, it was nice talking to you on the phone! Thank you also for inquiring about the “missing” email! I would have written to you long ago if it wasn’t for the telephones being out of order! Actually I lost some emails in the process due to this! We must go to town to an Internet Café for our emails, because our line cannot convey data. This is quite tiresome and expensive. I personally have difficulties to concentrate in such places: there is so much noise and music etc. Therefore please bear with us if I cannot reply as fast or well as I would have wished to do! I was very surprised when dear Valerie told us about you! And that you wish to assist a project here in Kenya! Usually I must fight for every Cent for my children! How nice to get to know such kind people like you! Right now we are caring for about 78 children from new-borns to 18 year olds. Their Mums are all in prison (in very few cases we would know a

father!) Some of these women are jailed for hawking without a licence or because they cannot pay their house-rent in the slums or other petty crime. We also deal with child abuse cases. In most cases their offence is poverty related. I don’t know whether you have heard of this case of a Bishop Deya, a Kenyan who founded a sect and lives as a millionaire in England now. He has stolen a lot of babies here in Kenya and claims that he is able to pray over barren women and then they give birth after 3 months! (the story is found in the internet BBC-archive) We are caring for 12 of these so –called “miracle babies” and as they have been very sick when they came to us we not only struggle to feed them but also to meet their hospital bills. I will send you an outline so that you might know what we do and how we try to bring development!

I’ll also try to email some photos to you. It you could only see them in reality and hold them and cradle them! It is true that we need money to feed them, to clothe them, send them to school or take them to hospital, but what they need most is love. Some of them have such sad history that one can wonder whether their soul will ever heal even though the body has recovered! They deserve all the love one can give! Thank you so much for helping us to show them this love! Hoping to hear from you soon again! Is it possible for you to mail us a photo of you? That would be nice! And – if you like it- maybe you tell us a bit more about you!

Meanwhile I wish you the best!

Yours Irene

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E-mail sent on 13th March 2005

Dear Susan, thank you so much for your email! Please excuse that I do reply late – I always feel guilty about it – but you know how difficult it is for me to come round! Thank you also very much for your big donation! This is so generous of you! I would like to send you a receipt but don’t have your address. Will you please let me have it in your next email?

I will pay in this donation (it has arrived on 2.3. and amounts to 56 532, Kshs) to MEDS which is a Church Organisation that supplies Projects like ours with medicines. Their prices are cheaper than market prices and one can be sure that their medicines are genuine. We have 4 children who are on ARV drugs and that is so expensive. Having your donation at MEDS we can now be sure that we have enough credit to get all the drugs we need for the next 3 months!!!!! Isn’t that great?

We have baby twins at the moment. They are identical girl twins and look really cute. Their mother absconded after giving birth. We received them at the age of 3 days and first were really scared of how to handle two babies with a birth weight less than 1700 g. But now they are 3 months old and both weigh now 4 kgs. Still small but they are fine! Two weeks ago we had the police bring us a little, very handsome boy who was dumped in the bush near our Home. He was about 3 or 4 hours old. He was wrapped in a blanket which had “Prestige Ward” printed on it (looked like from an expensive hospital) and his umbilical cord was sealed with a plastic clamp which is not common in cheap hospitals. The baby had a good birth weight of 3.6 kgs which is rare for an African child. With all this evidence one would think that it was easy for the police to trace the mother. But they are not concerned and so far no investigations have been done! Isn’t that so sad?

We hope that we can find good people who will eventually adopt this beautiful baby. It is nice to hear that you had a good time with your Mum. I can imagine how hard it is for her to cope with the cold weather in England. My husband, who is suffering from Parkinson Disease (he was diagnosed when he was only 38, now he is 49) really suffers when it is cold. This year it was also very cold in Germany and there was so much snow! Here it is just the opposite: yesterday the newspaper said it wasn’t hot like that for the past 20 years. And there is not enough rain, so the harvest will be bad again. Not a good future perspective! I have to run now, have an appointment at the children’s hospital to clear some debts! Wish you a very good time and God bless you!

Irene

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