Before you are ever tempted to follow in the footsteps of George Benson and Whitney Houston. Before you burst into song with ‘I believe that children are our future. Treat them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.` Before you deceive yourself into thinking that your shower, karaoke, or headphones-on-the-bus version is just as good, just as moving, consider Amy and Ben’s story.
Ben was all set, as happy as could be. A student at Durham University, he had met this fabulous girl called Amy and she had agreed to go out on a date with him. Amy was not like anyone Ben had met before, so loving and caring, so single-minded too, as if she already knew what she wanted out of life. And so excited when talking about the year she had spent volunteering at an orphanage in Zimbabwe as well as the other trips she had made to help at Romanian orphanages, all before Durham. Anyway, the date, that was the main thing.
Amy liked Ben a lot. Ben actually listened and was happy to have long conversations about what mattered to her. But could she tell him? Would any relationship end before it began? For Amy had decided long ago never to walk in anyone’s shadow. If she failed or succeeded, she would live as she believed. She could even trace her determination back to the age of six when she saw pictures of the Ethiopian famine on television. Amy told her mother then that she would help emaciated babies like that when she grew up. The only question now was whether Ben would walk away from her when he found out what she had in mind.
Ben had already fallen for Amy but no, this wasn’t the conversation he was expecting on a first date. Yes, Amy wanted to adopt five children and move to Africa. No, it wasn’t because she couldn’t have children naturally. Yes, she felt the greatest love she could give was as a mother to babies who didn’t have one. Yes, Ben would like to see her again.
It all happened so fast. Wherever else he thought a career in IT might take him, whatever ambitions he had, Ben decided that Amy would come first, that she would be his future. After Durham and first work experience, to Tanzania they went, Amy to teach at the Isamilo International School, Ben to work in IT. In 2002 they married and settled in Mwanza, Tanzania’s port city in the north-west, on the shore of Lake Victoria. There they made regular visits to the local orphanage as both volunteers and would-be parents.
Step by step, visit by visit, year by year, Amy and Ben realised their shared dream of a family of adopted children: first, Barnabas, then Tia, next Charlie, followed by Molly and Leila. Except that this was Tanzania, a country ravaged by HIV/AIDS, a nation with more than three million orphans, a people nearly two thirds of whom lived below the poverty line. If, by chance, that special place, that they had been dreaming of, led them to do more, much more, that’s what they would do.
After Amy came across four babies in hospital, abandoned, starving, dying, Ben accepted and supported Amy’s resolution to act, putting aside any doubts or reservations. Together, they spent the next two years raising the money, securing the property, and recruiting the right people to open their own orphanage.
In 2006, Forever Angels was born in Tanzania, a charity, a baby home, an astonishing act of philanthropy. It was created by Amy, a tireless 24-year-old young English woman, a former schoolteacher, who took her belief – that a child with no mother, no family, would always struggle in life to find love in themselves, to give love, and to be loved, that all children deserve the chance to be raised in a loving family – to a new level of commitment.
At the time, her father told her that she needed to be ‘500% sure about this. Because this is for the rest of your life. If you do this, it is not going to be something you ever walk away from.’ And she hasn’t, remembering too, what else her father said, that she would always have ‘an army of people behind you’ like Ben, like her parents, like the Tanzanian people, so many of whose lives she has changed forever.
By the summer of 2023 Forever Angels had cared for more than 450 babies, both in the Mwanza Baby Home and in Family Houses. It had supported nearly 600 malnourished, orphan babies with milk and love at its centre in Mwanza. Added to that number are the lives of an estimated 1,300 babies saved through its Maisha Matters franchise across five Tanzanian cities that empowers families to care for their children at home.
Find your strength in love, as Amy or Ben, or George or Whitney, or you, or any future philanthropists studying at Durham University, might well sing.