Once abandoned, life gave abandoned babies a second chance

Mary Beckenham of Newlife Home in Nairobi has taken care of thousands of abandoned babies

Mary Beckenham vividly remembers the Sunday in 1991 when she stopped by a newsstand on her way home from church with her family and bought a copy of the Sunday Standard. Flipping through, she came across a story with the headline, ‘Thirty Five HIV-positive Babies Abandoned at Kenyatta National Hospital’.

“I read the story and felt a strong urge to do something about it,” she says. “I couldn’t believe that such young and innocent souls could be abandoned by their parents.”