It’s 8 o’clock in the morning, and Sr. Judith Auma sits in one of the dormitories at St. Josephine Bakhita Babies Home. She holds one of the babies upright and maintains eye contact so he feels loved and safe before she feeds him with infant formula.
“This is what I do every day to babies who live here because they have been abandoned by families who could not care for them,” she said, referring to St. Josephine Bakhita Babies Home, located several hundred miles west of the country’s capital, Nairobi, in the busy town of Busia.
Auma, a member of the Little Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, said the home started in 2021 to ensure all orphaned, vulnerable and abandoned babies can grow up in loving and healthy families in the metropolitan border town between Kenya and Uganda.
St. Josephine Bakhita Babies Home is under Amukura Orphanage Home, which also cares for newborn babies whose mothers have died, mainly due to the high maternal death rate in the region. The homes also host children who have been abandoned, orphaned or are homeless.
“Sisters and other staff working here are mothers to these children because the infants require a lot of care and attention,” Auma said as one of the babies guzzled milk from a bottle. “This is a calling because I have always loved children, even as a little girl. It’s a blessing whenever a child is brought here because we are mothers and can care for them.”
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