The orphanages in southeastern India take in the babies who have been abandoned by their destitute mothers and the babies who would have been murdered in earlier times. For families in precarious positions, the birth of a daughter is not an occasion to celebrate. Because of her rigidly prescribed role, she will consume more than she can contribute.

The women who work at the orphanages do the best they can but they face many hardships themselves. They have little education and work for minimal pay and even less respect in order to buy food and send their children to school. Despite their best intentions, the babies handed over to their care may never learn to trust and the ones who survive may risk too much with strangers and nothing of their hearts with anyone.

Vonda Jump ’99PhD, senior researcher at the Early Intervention Research Institute in USU’s Center for Persons with Disabilities, remembers her excitement and nervousness when Hands to Hearts International asked her to work with these women.  
An intervention might make the difference between existing or thriving, a life of misery in the orphanage or happiness. On the other hand, as Jump wrote on her return: “I would be stepping into and steeping myself in a culture radically different from my own. From acceptable women’s dress to eating behavior to which way my bare feet could point, I had a lot to learn. I only hoped that it would be a mutual learning experience, and that the women I would be working with would accept what I had to offer.”

What Jump had to offer was her knowledge of early childhood development and the healing power of infant massage. For her doctoral thesis, she compared the attachment of babies who were regularly massaged with those who weren’t. Her own experience testified to the benefits. When her baby Bianca was born, Jump’s daily massages cued her into the early distress signals of yet another ear infection. Bianca had 13 infections during her first year, and every one of them was noticed and treated before her hearing was damaged. The bonding nurtured trust and confidence.

Jump visited several orphanages in India and at every one she observed conditions she had seen before in other impoverished countries. With five caretakers randomly assigned to 25 infants, diapers got changed and food was shoveled into mouths on the caretakers’ timetable, not their charges’. The lack of a familiar face, eye contact and tender touch exacerbated high rates of illness due to shared toys and sleeping spaces. From one orphanage to the next, Jump encountered the same situation: a room full and earful of crying babies. They clamored for attention, for someone to hold them and love them.   

Overwhelmed by the enormity of their responsibilities at home, the caretakers got no rest in their workplaces either. The volume of the wailing couldn’t be turned down, let alone off. They thought that if they became too attached to the children, it would be difficult for both if an adoption took place.

Do babies feel emotions? Jump asked.

A unanimous no.

Are babies’ brains fully developed at birth?

Yes, of course they are.

A lecture would have alienated them. Why should they believe some foreigner who couldn’t even speak their language? With the help of a translator, Jump engaged them in conversation and began interacting with the babies so the caretakers could witness the possibilities. “Eventually they began to see that babies not only have emotions, but that part of their jobs is to respond to those emotions,” Jump wrote in her report afterwards. “When they told me that babies were not social and they watched a two-week-old respond to a voice, they began to believe. When they told me that babies don’t like to be sung to and they watched two 14-month-olds stop what they were doing and watch me the entire time I sang, “I Had a Little Turtle,’ they believed a little more. When the babies stopped crying and looked them in the eye after being picked up, they believed even more.”

Several days after her first sessions with caretakers at an orphanage outside Chennai, India, Jump spotted one of them sitting with an infant in her lap. She stuck out her tongue. The baby imitated her. The caretaker laughed with delight. A 15-month-old, who had never been encouraged to walk before, stood upright, held there by his “surrogate” mother, who now had five infants in her care instead of 25 shared with others. As the two of them walked together, the baby tested the sturdiness of his legs without falling, while his caretaker beamed with pride.

“These women took the little bit of knowledge we had constructed together, and they ran with it. It was as if they’d been doing these things all their lives,” Jump wrote.

With only a few changes in policies and practices that cost nothing to implement, the orphanages became more home-like and pleasurable for caretakers and recipients.

Her last morning in India, Jump rose at dawn so she could sneak into “our” training room and listen one last time to the babies awakening in the next room. As one cry after another sputtered to life and merged into a universal plea for attention, a woman’s voice could be heard, humming a hymn. The crying ceased; Jump felt calm and at peace. She knew she was leaving the babies in loving hands. 

Jump has also worked with orphanages in Ecuador, Haiti and Russia.
In one of the videotapes she recorded in Haiti for follow-up purposes, Bianca, a teenager now, sits on a mat with a couple of babies in her lap, and several more awaiting their turn. Arms wiggle, fingers touch twitching toes in binges of self-exploratory delight. On the mat adjacent to Bianca, another half-dozen babies are sprawled on their backs, their eyes unfocused, their limbs limp. One of them looks sickly, more skeleton showing than flesh. She has been given enough food to barely get by but not enough affection.

The baby on Bianca’s left thigh is getting a backrub. She gazes up at Bianca’s face and for a split second their eyes lock. —Jane Koerner

For more information about Vonda Jump’s orphanage work for Hands to Hearts International, email her at vonda.jump@usu.edu.