Guest Blogger: Sheila Leech
Today we said good-bye top half of our team who headed South to Ghana for a couple of days to work with our radio partner in Bolgatanga. They will take care of children at the school associated with the radio station there.
The rest of us headed out to a rural area again, about 30 minutes drive from Ouagadougou. For the next few days, we will work at a very nice clinic that serves some very poor areas around the city.
When we arrived at the clinic, we noticed that there were many children around and when we asked why this was so. We learned that they were sick….and so they were. Some of the children were so ill that they could not stand up and were lying on the dusty floor. For a short while, I felt a bit overwhelmed and at a loss to know what to do; the sickest children were the small ones and they had no parents with them.
What could we do? We could not hand over medicines to such small children and expect them to know how to take them.
So, again, as so often happens on trips like this one, we improvised… with the help of the clinic staff we found some mattresses and laid them on the floor and put the smallest, sickest children in a darkened room to sleep.
We made frequent trips in there to monitor them, to give medicines and to ensure they were sipping on the oral rehydration fluids that we had prepared for them. It was truly rewarding to see one of them recover sufficiently to get up, even smile and have a photo taken with us…and all this by noon.
I was shocked to see how severely undernourished some of the children were. One little girl is 8 years old and is 13 kilos underweight…that’s about 28 pounds! Her tiny little face had the worried, pinched kind of appearance that malnutrition gives. Later we saw her in line for the lunch which the school provides, and saw that she has an identical twin sister…also alarmingly underweight!!! They have no mother and are being raised by their father, but it would seem that resources are pitifully scarce in that family.
One of our Ecuadorian doctors noticed how sad the children’s faces were as they came through the clinic. Not so at the school and orphanage where we saw bright happy lines of children waiting for their lunch...plastic pails in hand ready to receive large piles of rice which they then scooped into their mouths with their hands. I feel like I shook a thousand hands and said a thousand “Bonjours” to those sweet children.
Seeing the children of Africa in these past few days has really made me reflect on how important children are to Jesus and how precious they are. We learn a lot from these little ones….they trust; they do not presume; they accept; they do not judge; they wait; they do not hurry.
It is truly a privilege to reach out and extend a hand to these children and to offer albeit a cup of cold water (with rehydration salts)…in Jesus´ name.
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