My life has changed because of this young lady here on the left. Her name is Karie Parrish and she is the sister missionary who taught my Mom and me the Gospel of Jesus Christ and gave an amazing example of selflessness, hard work and service 18 years ago.
In this picture me and Katie are on one of our trips to baby orphanages in Ukraine. I absolutely LOVED playing and holding those little babies. There in the baby orphanage they told us that all these babies needed is to be held. They had so many babies and not enough workers to even hold those babies every day. They said they would just lay in their cribs quietly until it was feeding time or changing time. Can you imagine?
Now those of us who have kids know that holding the baby and playing with the baby at this young age is one of the most important things that you can do for them. That is how their nervous system develops, by touch and feel they learn about this world. If those babies don't get enough interaction during the day they consequently slow down in development and many other consequenses follow.
This is me as a teenager in another baby orphanage. I did not grow up abound lots of kids. I remember how exciting it was for me to hold a baby.
At that time that was all we did, we just played with the kids and took them outside. This is an easy age, so to speak. When these kids grow older and they don't have someone who they know that loves and cares for them they will grow up, drop out of school and end up in prison.
There is no much that we can do. I know you might be thinking :"Where in the world will I get money to go to those orphanages to help?" But there are other things you can do to help:
I just found a couple of people that volunteer at these orphanages. And if you don't have the means there are things that you can do from home check this out:
http://anorphansmiles.org/joomla15/index.php/howtohelp/volopp
this is a link to volunteer positions that are needed. There are other way on this web site that you can help with. check it out. I myself am excited to write letters to kids and hopefully find sponsors for some kids as well.
