The Daily O’Collegian

Kenyan parents, overwhelmed by disease and poverty, give up their children.

Editor’s Note: This is the second part in a three-day series about Kenya, Africa.

THIKA, Kenya — In November 2005, somewhere in Kenya, Dave was born.

When his mother had him, one may wonder whether she looked at him for a long period of time, thinking about the future of her newborn boy.

Maybe she thought about how she was going to feed him, how she was going to pay for everything that comes along with having a child.

Maybe she was scared. One may never know.

Kenyan police found Dave on the streets of Thika, Kenya when he was about 4 months old.

He had been abandoned.

Dave has lived at Thika District Hospital since the time the police brought him, meaning he has lived more than 80 percent of his life in a hospital, said Ann Mwangi, the pediatric nurse at the hospital.

Nurses at the hospital care for Dave, once abandoned by one mother but now a child with many women serving in her place.

Mwangi said the police bring at least one baby every two months.

“When they are quite small, they go to the maternity [ward],” Mwangi said. “Sometimes they are very sick.”

Tony Sellars, director of communications for Feed the Children, said he thinks the main reason people abandon their children is because of AIDS.

“The mother’s dying,” Sellars said. “They know they can’t provide for the child, there’s no father, sometimes both parents have died of AIDS.

“If they’re unable to care for the children, they don’t see any other option but to abandon the child.”

About 1.1 million children are orphans because of AIDS in Kenya, a country whose population is 34,256,000, according to the UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS.

Sellars said many of the mothers of the children at a center for children found in Kenya, have died of AIDS.

Larry and Frances Jones, Feed the Children founders, created the Abandoned Baby Center in 2001.

Kenyan police bring babies to the center and sometimes babies are brought in after the parents abandon them at the hospital, Sellars said.

“And sometimes they’re found piled up in weeds,” Sellar said.

Boy without a face

When he was a baby, Daniel Wachira was found on top of a trash pile.

Dogs had chewed away part of his face, Sellars said.

Daniel was brought to the Abandoned Baby Center.

The Joneses have recently brought this 5-year-old boy from Kenya to Houston.

They have been able to work with a team of surgeons in Houston who plans to reconstruct Daniel’s ear next month.

“He’s one of the extreme examples,” Sellars said.

Sellars said they’re working on building a type of door at the Abandoned Baby Center where people, without being seen, can drop off a child.

Adopting an abandoned child

Many may feel what these abandoned children need is a place to call home.

However, it is not a simple process to adopt a child from Africa, said Daniel Lauer, the senior executive for Holt International, an international adoption agency.

“Basically the legal structure for international adoption that exist aren’t in place in Africa,” Daniel Lauer said.

Some countries are working on reforming the laws, but when millions are dying from AIDS and also starving to death, international adoption laws aren’t exactly on the top of the priority list, Lauer said.

“I think there’s an increasing awareness and there’s a lot of pressure from adoptive families and agencies that are wanting to place kids from Africa so the pressure is increasing,” Lauer said. “The pressure is on a lot of Africa to move forward with reform. I think that’s only going to increase over the next few years.”

There are no adoption agencies in the U.S. that are successfully completing adoptions from Kenya at this time, according to the Africa’s Angels Web site, an informational site about Africa and adoption.

“Kenyan courts are not institutionally biased against foreigners seeking to adopt children in Kenya,” according to the according to the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs Web site.

“The Kenyan government is not currently allowing children to be taken from Kenya if there is any intention that they will be adopted in the United States,” according to the Web site.

“Therefore, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi is not issuing IR-4 (child to be adopted in the United States) visas.”

Lauer said adoptions are occurring in Kenya, but the children are adopted within the country only and stay there.

“There’s obviously plenty of children that could benefit from adoptive placement, but the systems aren’t in place to allow that happen very effectively,” Lauer said.

Until Kenyan adoption laws become more effective, abandoned babies like Dave, will still have to call hospitals and orphanages their home.