Durban - He was found abandoned at the roadside hours after he was born but Thabo proved to be a fighter and this month a Canadian couple met and welcomed into their family the happy, healthy now one-year-old.
“It was surreal,” Thabo’s new mother, Dana, told the Daily News, “I’d been staring at his photograph for three weeks and then to see him, in front of me, was just overwhelming.”
She had prepared herself for the fact that, having never met her or her husband, Nik, before, Thabo might be wary of them. “But when I put my hands out, he just came right to me and snuggled into my chest,” she said.
Thabo was found by a city worker in bush alongside the M13, in Westville, on a hot summer’s day last November, with his umbilical cord still attached.
Luckily for the baby, Westville police officers Sergeant Stephen Clark and Constable Wynand Laatz responded and Laatz, being a paramedic, was able to clean him up and provide him with the immediate care he needed until an ambulance could be dispatched.
Last week the officers took time to meet Thabo’s new parents and bid him farewell.
“We’re incredibly thankful to them and it was so nice for us to be able to meet them,” Dana said.
“You can tell that to them, this wasn’t just another job. They really cared.”
Dana and Nik were also thankful to Baby Hope House, the Westville home for babies and children, where Thabo spent his first year.
“You can just tell that his life there was so full of love and care,” she said.
Dana and Nik came to South Africa from their home town of Ontario, with their daughter and three other sons, aged 5 to 9, earlier this month and would be heading home, with their now five-strong brood, next month, Dana said. Until then they would be “lying low” and bonding as a family.
She said of Thabo’s brothers and sisters, that meeting him had been as much of a huge moment for them as it had been for his parents.
And as for Thabo, Dana said he was a sweet, gentle child with a joyful, happy nature.
“He’s slowly letting us get to know him. Every day we see him open up a little more and every day we get to see a little more of his goofy side.”
She encouraged others, who were considering adoption, to persevere through the paperwork and the lengthy process.
It had taken four years for Dana and Nik to find a child to adopt. “But now that we’ve met Thabo, we know why,” she said. “It was so worth it all,” she said.
Those interested in adoption are advised to contact an accredited social worker.
Daily News
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