Nothing can prepare you for the first time you meet the children at Beautiful Gate, an orphanage in Lesotho, South Africa.

No matter how much research you do, no matter how many people you talk to beforehand, it is one of those moments that changes something inside you forever.

Whether it's the overwhelming attention from the older children who literally throw themselves at you when you arrive, or the first time you hold one of the tiny newborn babies in your arms.

Beautiful Gate is the only orphanage in Lesotho that takes infants because formula milk is so expensive there. One new arrival was just two days old.

You find yourself gazing down at the little bundle swaddled in blankets and wondering what their story might be?

How did they end up here? Where are their parents? What is their future?

I've never been madly maternal, so I was totally unprepared for how it affected me.

For several weeks afterwards I couldn't even look at photos of the children - of one little boy in particular.

He was around 14 months old and had just learnt to walk. He would never cry when you put him in his cot at night. He knew there was no point. When you are one of a dozen children in a home with two house mothers you don't have someone at your beck and call.

But then the children at Beautiful Gate are the lucky ones in Lesotho. Here they get three hot meals a day, clean clothes and a bed for the night.

My daughter Georgia and I were part of a group of ten women who travelled to Beautiful Gate during the October half term last year.

Before we set off someone said you should always expect the unexpected when you're travelling in Africa and that was certainly the case from the moment we arrived at Johannesburg airport.

It took nearly an hour and a half to sort out our mini bus hire - even though we we had paid and booked in advance.

On our six hour journey to Lesotho we encountered every weather condition from sunshine, storms and snow showers, as well as pot holes the size of dustbin lids and jackknifed lorries.

But the welcome you receive from the team at Beautiful Gate makes it all worthwhile.

It really is a beautiful place. We had everything we needed. We slept in bunk beds in the lodge house, we had hot showers and a well equipped kitchen.

Beautiful Gate was at full capacity when we arrived catering for a maximum of 75 children from newborns to five years old.

As volunteers, we were not allowed to know an individual child's story because the aim is to eventually give them a fresh start with a new family.

But we are told that many of them have been orphaned because of AIDS(one in four people are HIV positive) or through extreme poverty (two in five people live on less than £1 a day).

Children are sometimes treated with no more respect than a discarded sweet wrapper. Some have literally been found in rubbish bins, toilet pits or even abandoned in a forest.

Beautiful Gate is a Christian run orphanage that aims to find these children a home with a family that will love them as their own.

The staff and volunteers we met treated the children as their own and made sure that they are given the chance to live as children.

They are also given opportunities to go to school, to play with their friends as well as they physical and emotional support all children need.

There are many happy stories about children who are eventually found homes.

Currently the only countries that can adapt children from Beautiful Gate are America, Canada, Sweden and Holland.

Perhaps it's just as well as I would definitely have brought that little boy back with me!

Although helping out in in an orphanage isn't going to change the world and it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the issues there, it does help to know that in a small way it does make a difference to these children at least.

For more information, visit beautifulgatelesotho.org.