Faces behind the numbers

Over the last week we have had responses from five individuals and two churches/groups to help with nutrition expenses! Only five months to go to cover the whole year at $1600 each month. Today I was reminded that God sees the needs here, and plans ahead, and it is our privilege to be a small part of His work on behalf of the orphans and widows and hungry people he cares about. We have been in the new ward for one week . . . But today there are 30 patients in our 27 beds, meaning 3 on the floor. Yes, even this huge new ward is filled to overflowing. If we had not moved, I think I’d be crying in despair. As it is, we were ready for the upsurge. Two weeks ago we thought we might have to quit providing nutrition at all, our program was out of money and our UNICEF grant proposal was denied. But people responded with generosity and just in time for probably the highest number of severely malnourished kids we’ve ever had to care for at one time.

Sixteen of those thirty inpatients are malnourished. Today on rounds I snapped a photo of each one, to remind myself and all of us that these are individuals, human beings for whom God created good plans. The first four are low-birth-weight babies, premature but also small for their gestation. The top two are twins, one of whom essentially died yesterday while I was on seeing another patient. The mother had started crying that he was dead, and sure enough I found him darkly purple, with no heart beat or respiratory effort. A few minutes of CPR, stimulation, antibiotics . . . And he was breathing and revived. The third one did the same thing today while waiting to be seen in nutrition . . Costa suddenly brought him into the room where I was seeing another patient saying “this baby has packed” and I saw that he also was dusky, not breathing, but this time the heart had not completely stopped. He was also able to be revived and is now on oxygen thanks to the new ward, the oxygen concentrator, and power from the generator. All four are gestating skin to skin for warmth, sipping expressed breast milk, and supplemental formula to encourage growth.

Next are the newest admissions, from today: a child age 2 1/2 who had poked along until a month ago then began to drastically lose weight. We routinely screen for HIV infection and found this one was positive, one of the last kids born before our universal screening of pregnant women began in 2004. Another is a four-year-old from Congo whose parents both died from cholera within a few days of each other, and a few months later presented to us with Kwashiorkor, swelling of the body from protein deficiency as she eats a very marginal diet in the care of her old grandmother.

Others have been on the ward for some time, struggling with sickle cell disease or malaria, diseases that push them over the edge in a place where food is bulky and not very highly caloric, or where families barely manage in good times but are thrown into disarray by these chronic illnesses. Two of the three with sickle cell were diagnosed in the last few days as a result of our screening of kids failing to thrive. Two have absent fathers who are fighting for Uganda in Southern Sudan, to protect the people of the north from the LRA. One of those has AIDS. The other has no real disease, but his mother basically tries to feed herself and her four children with no help from relatives, no land, doing odd jobs for coins to survive. After a week of milk in addition to breast feeding the baby is finally up to five pounds at one month of age . . .

Near the bottom the babies of three heroines, breast-feeding grandmothers, women whose daughters or daughter-in-laws have died. Left with the care of their grandchildren they have bravely attempted to re-lactate, in these three cases successfully, though the children have needed some additional nutrition. No retirement relaxation for them, they have their hands full with the hourly care of infants. The last one looks pretty good compared to the rest . . Because he went home today. Though his bed was only empty for moments before it filled again with another needy child.

THANKS to those of you who have gone out of your way to provide for these children. I hope you are encouraged by seeing their faces, to know that you are helping real people. It helps me to make it through the long day when I hear the words of Jesus “as you did it to the least of these” . . . . In a small way this ward is the house of God, because Jesus lives there in these faces.