Bethany Orphanage

For the past few months, I have been volunteering at Bethany Orphanage with my aunt, Kristi, and my cousin, Sofi.  We go for a few hours on Tuesday mornings to play with the toddlers there.  Many orphanages in Albania are dreary places to live, and the children are not always properly taken care of.  However, Bethany is a wonderful orphanage with beautiful facilities and workers who truly care about the children.  There are about twenty toddlers that we play with, and they are all so precious!  Many of these children lived in awful situations and witnessed horrific events before coming to live at the orphanage, and as a result, some of them are very emotionally scarred.  They receive wonderful care at Bethany, but it is still a hard life to live in a home with twenty other toddlers and only a few workers to share between them, without a family and without one-on-one attention.  It has been a wonderful experience to be able to go for a few hours a week and love on these little ones.