Peek-a-Boo! I see you!

Zech, the 4 year missionary kid living where we're taking care of David, taught him how to play. :)

The tests showed David's hemoglobin levels are down even more than they were before and the doctor has no idea why. We've been giving him RB Tone twice a day to help with iron, and we're wondering if there isn't something more involved here like sickle cell anemia or something else that the Kabwe clinics are unable to test for.

One thing we found that causes anemia is lead poisioning, which is very likely here in Kabwe (4th Most Polluted) because of the lead mines.

Good news is, his fever is completely gone and he has no symptoms of being sick that we can detect other than the slightly yellowed eyes and white palms from anemia.

So a picture is worth a thousand words… how about 2?

2 weeks ago...

...

...Now!

He has improved so much, each day he looks more and more like a normal, healthy little boy. He played his new harmonica for me (as well as any 2 year old!) and he’s got it in his mind that when he gets well he is going to get a green suit – man, does his face light up when he talks about it! We’ve decided we need to take up a collection to have one made for him. His mother was saying how if we had told her a month ago that he would look like this today, she wouldn’t have believed it…

The protein malnourishment is no longer the issue, all the swelling is gone, but we do think he has some sort of infection. He has continued having a fever and still has signs anemia so he’s going to the doctor again this morning for more tests, but considering he wasn’t expected to live to the end of the week we are all in pretty high spirits and thank God for each day we have with him. I’ll let you know how the visit goes! I know I don’t have to say it again, but I will… please pray!

It’s been a busy day and I’m looking forward to climbing into bed, but I just felt I should first update you on David since it’s been a couple days…

I know I can’t let appearances fool me, but David is looking much better. The swelling around his feet has dropped several cm’s and he was able to get his shoes on for the first time yesterday. When I walked into the yard he was outside with his mother and he tottered over and clutched my leg for me to pick him up… talk about melting my heart. Today he went the whole day without vomiting or diarrhea, and despite his whimper of ‘I have no power’ in Nianja, he had plenty of ‘power’ to try fighting away the chicken puree and soy mince. And while he still has a temperature it has stayed below 100 F rather than the constantly fluctuating temperatures of the last few days. And his weight has dropped a kg!

Trying not to get my hopes up too much, but days like these are definitely encouraging. I got a devious little grin out of him on one of his good days last week and I’m determined to get another one.

Thank you for all of your prayers, don’t let up!

He had a temperature of 105 F in the morning, we’ve been trying to give him fever reducer every 4 hours to get it down and keep it down now. He vomited in the morning, had diarrhea in the afternoon. He’s refusing to eat and makes himself gag but drinks like a fish. His pneumonia is getting worse and the antibiotics are not working. The edema in his face has gone up a little, his feet are so swollen they look like they’re going to burst. His heart, liver, and kidneys are all in poor shape. Everything we give him that’s supposed to be good for one thing ends up being bad for another. Bibi’s treated so many protein malnourished children, sometimes 30 or 40 at a time, and she says she would keep children like David in a separate room from the others. She doesn’t think he’s going to make it.

It’s been a week now since I started helping with David and it has taken all my energy, he’s constantly on my mind even when I’m not with him. I feel sorry for Alisha having to live with me, having a conversation for 5 or 10 minutes without an interruption about something else concerning David is nearly impossible with me. I am so tired.

It’s been a rough week for David, lots of ups and downs. We thought he was doing better when his appetite picked up, his fever lowered to below 100, and the swelling went down ½ a cm around his feet, and his diarrhea slowed. He had stopped vomiting and has been much more agreeable during feeding (even though he relieved his bladder on me a couple of times yesterday I chose to take that as meaning he was comfortable with me). His sores even looked like they were starting to heal yesterday. Our main worry was that his weight had plateaued instead of going down, but we were at least thankful that it had stopped going up.

But last night David’s temperature spiked to 104, so he was immediately put on malaria treatment and then taken to the doctor this morning where tests showed he has a chest infection. Despite our attempts at optimism, we know we still have a long way to go before he’s in the clear. His immune system is pretty much non-existent, and the doctor said it could take 2 or 3 months for him to start being ‘back to normal’.

Getting a smile out of David is pretty much impossible, but he was telling his auntie yesterday when we weren’t in the room that he doesn’t want to go home because the ‘muzungus’ (white people) give him milk and chicken. His 3rd birthday is July 16, we’ve already decided we’re throwing him a big party when he makes it. He has to make it.

Baby David

There is a baby here with protein malnourishment and his mother is unable to provide the care he needs on her own. Bibi is a retired missionary/nurse who the baby was brought to and she wanted to take him in right then but knew that he’s more than she can handle right now, so she sent the baby back with his mother until she figured out what to do. She had seen many children with it this severe who had died within 4 or 5 days.

She had told me this in passing conversation, that she didn’t even know if he would last the week, and it just stayed with me that this child needed someone to take responsibility and look out for him. It weighed heavily on my heart that I had something to offer, that I came here to help children like baby David and to avoid that direct involvement would be a contradiction to what I profess to be doing here. I spoke to Hands at Work and got permission to take time from the office to help with the baby.

I started on Sunday and there are 2 other women who have gotten involved as well so I will not be the only one watching out for him. At this point I have the afternoon to evening shift, so I can still be working in the office in the mornings and helping Alisha as much as I can. He is on day 6 now so he’s already outlived Bibi’s statistic, but yesterday he was taken to the clinic for tests and was found to be extremely anemic, with blood iron levels at half of what it should be. He also has the start of pneumonia with fluid around his lungs and a fever of about 101 F. His body is badly swollen and he has sores on his feet and above his right ear on which we regularly apply Neosporin. As the swelling goes down we want his weight to drop with it, but instead his weight has been steadily increasing. We hope it is because of all the food he’s getting now that he didn’t before and not that the water is going somewhere else in his body like his lungs. He has chronic diarrhea during the night which is good but we’re afraid he’s holding it in during the day.

We have to do feedings every 20 minutes, which can be tricky to regulate when it can take 10 minutes for him to eat an oz of yogurt or boiled egg yolk. The first few days we could barely get him to take more than 1/2 oz of anything, then we discovered that if we take him away from his mother to do the feedings he is much more cooperative and yesterday we were able to up the doses to 2 oz. Unfortunately the meds prescribed to him at the clinic gave him an upset stomach which caused him to lose several hours of feeding.

As I was holding him in my arms last night I realized just how much of a hold he has on my heart already. When it first came to me that maybe I should help I couldn’t help feeling a bit scared, that maybe I wouldn’t be able to handle the responsibility. When I was praying about it this is the verse I received:

John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give you. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

I am trying to hold onto this verse and remember that David’s life is in God’s hands and not mine. It doesn’t always feel that way. Please pray for him.

“Halleluiah! God has spared your life another year! He has a plan.” –Lawrence, Service Centre Coordinator

How did you start your year?

I spent New Years Day traveling north with some friends to Mulanga, a heavily populated compound fraught with poverty, HIV/AIDS, violence, and alcoholism. It is also home to scores of vulnerable children and orphans. We went there to visit James, one of our CBO managers who started a feeding program for 20 orphans as well as a home based care with volunteers visiting the sick in their homes. After they started home based care at the beginning of 2008, there was such a spiritual response in the community that one of the volunteers, Pastor Blessings, started a church in Mulanga that has grown to over 40 members.

While we were there we visited the little house that James rented in Mulanga for a widow to live in and feed the childen a meal each day. James and Ma Junior told us some of the individual stories, how there was a little girl who lived far on the other side of town but had walked all the way to the house and spent the previous 3 nights there with Ma Junior without anyone caring enough to come looking for her. They told us about another young girl whose father had just been killed on the nearby path a couple weeks earlier and they were trying to figure out how to include her in the already maxed out feeding program.

We had previously asked James to dream big. If he could do anything, money aside, what would it be? He was a bit hesitant, almost as if he was afraid saying it allowed would crush the dream. A school. He mentioned one of the girls in the feeding program who was 12 years old and had never been to school. He wants more for her future just as he does for his 18 month old daughter and the other children he cares for. He even found a plot of land near the feeding point that the town is willing to give him for free, but he had no way of taking the dream further.

In the 2 weeks since that visit, Hands at Work has secured sponsorship from a church in the US to support the work James is doing as well as for building a community school in Mulanga. He came to Kabwe on the 9th (my birthday :P) with George (Hands CEO) and he was still trying to process that it was actually going to happen! Stories like these are what make me excited, I don’t know about you…

Now another fun (aka frustrating) Zambian story about visas! The work visa that Alisha and I have expires on Tuesday the 20th and when we went to the immigration office on Wednesday to get temporary permits we were told that we needed to apply for those at the headquarters in Lusaka. Luckily Alisha was heading there on Thursday anyway with her parents, so she took my paperwork and all but when she got there in the afternoon they told her they only take payment in the mornings. So she went the next morning. Then they told her no, they don’t take cash, they need a check. Problem: we’re not allowed to open bank accounts with work visas! Figure that one out. Anyways, a few hours later she somehow managed to get a bank check (still waiting to hear that story) and they told her that they can’t do anything now until Tuesday! Being that it’s the last day of our visa, it had better go through or we could be facing fines for overstaying our visa… oh yes, and it is left up to the discretion of the officer how long the permit lasts, he could say 10 days and then we’d have to pay again or he could give us the full 6 months. And these permits are not cheap…

Another challenge Alisha and I are facing is that Zambian Airways recently went under and that’s who our return flight is with. Some friends of ours were trying to get back here from Tanzania when it happened and are now out $1400 after having to purchase new tickets with another airline. Zambian Airways has taken their phones off the hook and locked their doors, no chance of working with them to get reimbursed. We are still trying to see if we can get anything back through MasterCard, but your prayer and support would be greatly appreciated!