In the 6-30-2011 post, I told you about a 3 month old baby, Amanda, who was severely malnourished. [Please click here to read that post] By the time our staff returned there, less than one month later to take her, she had died despite the effort we made to buy her formula and educate the grandmother.
Our center is very far from this area of the country. To get there, we have to take bus after bus. It takes an entire day to travel there. That’s because we have to wait for hours in different towns to catch the next bus. We don’t own any means of transportation.
When my wife and I heard the news of little Amanda’s death, it broke our hearts. My wife wept. For a while, I felt guilty that my family of four has two cars while five hundred orphans have no means of transportation—and a child has died because of that.
I am very convinced that if our staff had adequate transportation to be able to move around easily, Amanda may have lived. For the last year or so, we have prayed for God to provide a pickup truck that can be used for emergency cases such as this one and for going to markets and farms to buy food at low prices.
Two days ago, the team returned from selecting an additional 237 orphans for us to help by September 2011. That adds up to the 150 previously selected to make 387 which is 113 shy of our goal of 500 new orphans by September 2011. God willing, the team will go out to once more to seek to meet the goal.
I would like to let you know that we are not focused on numerical growth. The stark truth is that each of those five hundred children is a real kid or baby like Amanda who can die. It is not so much about the numbers. Numbers matter just because they represent lives.
During this last trip, the team found two other children like Amanda. These ones are twins. About 10 months old. They are also being cared for by their grandmother with the same corn starch called “Pap” that Amanda was fed. A terrible nuance about this case is that grandmother has been breastfeeding the twins as a pacifier! She obviously doesn’t produce any milk but does it simply because it helps them quiet down. They are also severely malnourished. As in Amanda ‘s case, understandably, the grandmother cannot just meet our staff the first time and hand over her children regardless of how bad a condition they’re in. The culture is different. She needs a little time to be educated and learn to trust us before handing over the children. Besides, she needs to seek the counsel of other relatives. That means she needs a few days to a week. But our staff goes out on schedule for an entire week to walk from door to door in distant villages where they don’t even speak the dialects. They sleep in motels or with local Christians if any are available. It’s tough. They can’t return quickly. The best they can do is return within a month. But that wasn’t enough time to save Amanda’s life.
With a truck, they can return within a few days to pick up children like Amanda and provide life-saving medical and nutritional care. In Amanda’s honor, we have started “The Amanda Project”, to raise money for a pickup truck for the orphans and to raise emergency funds to help us respond quickly to save children like Amanda.