Church baby awaits a loving family

BANGALORE: It was a rainy Monday evening. The attendance was not at its usual full at Calvary Chapel at Ashoknagar in Banashanakari I Stage.
Fifty-year-old Gunasekaran who stays a few metres away, was on his way to offer prayers at 7.45 pm when he saw something still on the dim lit church verandah. A few steps toward it, it was a just-born baby.
The baby girl lay bare on the ground with the moist umbilical cord entangled around her slimy body and her tiny hands and feet had turned blue.Wondering if the baby was still alive, Gunasekaran lifted her and rushed to his wife Victoria.
The couple has been running an orphanage in the premises for 15 years but had never seen a baby abandoned in such a gruesome manner.
The baby was still warm. Victoria immediately cleaned the baby and wrapped her with a sheet. She tried to feed the baby with sugar water and they were delighted to hear the child''s first cry after a while.
Minutes later, the baby was on its way to the local police station. "We can look into formalities later. Please shift the baby to hospital immediately," the Banashankari police told the couple.
She has now stopped over at St. Martha''s Hospital for neo-natal care.
For the hospital records, her name is Church Baby. She weighs about 2.7 kilograms and she is doing fine according to doctors attending to her. On Wednesday morning, the baby was undergoing phototherapy.
"This is to prevent a possible occurrence of jaundice, which is otherwise a normal phenomenon. She has no medical problem as such and can be discharged anytime," says paediatrician Dr Kishore Baindur.
At the hospital''s baby ward, the thick-haired, fair-skinned beauty has charmed many a hospital employees. It was as if the child is lapping up all the love and affection she is destined to in her life.
After the baby is discharged, Gunasekaran, who runs a home for the disabled and semi-orphan children, wants to complete all legal formalities to put up the child for adoption.
"Children are not orphans. They are God''s own," he says with the experience of having been brought up in an orphanage since the age of 9.