Anna Dombkins

I know what this is.

And then we found out that I was pregnant.

And it was an absolute shock and surprise because it wasn't particularly easy for us to fall pregnant.

And so we weren't expecting a sixth child.

But it was an absolute joy in the end to welcome another baby into our family and for all of the kids together to get to welcome one more child.

And he kind of bookended our family in a beautiful way.

Yeah.

It was so special, I think, for them all to welcome a new family member.

And I think it just brought back, I think, having another newborn, just all of the needs that a newborn has and partly just that grief of missing those moments for three of our kids.

But mostly it was just the joy in watching them welcome a new person into their family and be the big kids for once.

Yeah, so many of those women had a similar story where they really wanted the babies that were born to them.

And in Tanzania, having quite a number of children is a really stabilising thing.

factor in a family so those children were really important to their family's survival but they weren't able to keep them so they either the mother had died or they weren't able to produce milk or they were just living in poverty and couldn't afford to keep them or there was some very short-term crisis that meant they could no longer keep their children with them

And that thought really came to us as we walked out of the baby home carrying three babies, which felt like a lot, but it also felt like nothing.

We were leaving 50 behind who had no one waiting there for them.

And that started that process of thinking there has to be another way because this adoption process has been so long and so crazy and this cannot be the best solution here.

And there has to be another way to support people

these babies to have a family long term and in fact so many of them have a family that want to keep them.

So what did you and Mark decide to do to try and help that?

Yeah so we worked with Amy who ran the baby home to hear all of these stories and work out what were these barriers and what could we do about it and she was piloting a program where she would provide 12 months of support for women and