Garden of Angels

Editor's Note : This is another story that I picked up from Reader's Digest. An interessting article to take note of our social problems nowadays. Be it in America or in other countries, such cases are occuring too fast and too rapidly. Brought about by unprotected underage sex and other related issues. We should take note of this and educate the younger generations.




After Laying dozens of tiny souls to rest, a woman takes up the fight to save young lives.

She has conducted the most solemn of rituals again and again, in the antiseptic crypts of the Los Angeles County coroner's office. After taking off the plastic wrap, Debi Faris washes and rocks each baby. "You can always see a face, and I never forget it," she says. "I rub their little hands and toes and say a prayer that people will be touched by this child. I take my time. Then I wrap the baby in a handmade blanket, place it in a casket with toys and poems, and carry it to the car for the ride back. I need to be alone for the drive. I need the silence."

Faris, 47, drives to the Garden of Angels, a small cemetery on a windswept hill 110 kilometres east of Los Angeles. Seven years ago, Faris founded the garden, which has become the final resting place for 65 babies to date, all of them abandoned in rubbish bins, tossed along highways or washed up on beaches.

"I know every one of these children's stories," Faris says. "I have become their voice. Even if they were just here for a moment, I believe they were hare for a purpose - and that purpose is to make sure we stop having burials in the Garden of Angels."

Her mission has transformed Faris from a shy, suburban mother into a lobbyist and lecturer on the national circuit in the United States. She drives along California's freeways in a silver station wagon with a rear- window banner that reads:"Don't Throw Your Baby Away!" In the US, more than 100 babies are discarded - literally thrown away - every year.

Some Americans states have passed laws allowing women to leave their unwanted but unharmed newborn babies in a designated safe place without fear of prosecution for child abandonment or loss of privacy. But when Faris started her work to save abandoned babies, California wasn't one of them.

Faris's journey beganone evening in May 1996 as she stood at the kitchen sink in her two-storey home in Yucaipa, California, cutting potatoes for the dinner she was preparing for her husband, Mark, a sales executive, her then-teenage sons, Brandon and Ryan, and daughter Jessica, ten. She was half-listening to the television when a news story caught her attention. A newborn boy had been found in a duffel bag along a freeway.

"Tossed out of the window like trash!" she exclaims, still amazed. "It just stopped me. Who knew this baby? Who would bury it? What was the mother thinking?"
The following evening, Faris sat with her family and proposed they do something loving for the baby - that they gave him a name and a proper burial. Jessica asked in amazement, "Somebody threw their baby away?" "It touched them in the same way it touched me," Faris says.

With no clue on how to proceed, Faris telephoned the Los Angeles Police Department. "We had never received a call like that - ever," recalls Detective Peggy Leberknight, whose first thought was that the caller was involved in the homicide. She referred Faris to the Los Angeles coroner's office, where husband-and-wife investigators Doyle and Gilda Tolbert were equally sceptical. "We don't get a lot of calls about dumped babies," says Gilda.

"Look," Faris pleaded, "I know you think I'm nutty, but I'm just a lady from Yucaipa whose family has been touched by this child, and we wouldlike to take care of him." The Tolberts launched background checks on Faris, which revealed nothing untoward. And Faris's resolve to help grew even stronger when she learned that if no-one came forward to claim him following a 30-day investigation, the baby from the freeway would be cremated, stored in a box for three years with other unknowns - "including muderersand drug dealers," she says - then dumped into a communal grave.