My Journey

 For the many of the children here and in other developing countries.  This week we had a young boy, 11 months old who came in for an abdominal hernia.  The day he was due to be discharged, I went to check on him and found him to be malnourished.  He also has a twin sister, but she is much healthier.  Many times patients want to be discharged as quickly as possible as they cannot afford to pay for a long stay.  I spoke with the mother and a friend of hers about the concerns I had for the child.  His name is Benic.  I encouraged her to stay 4-5 more days to see if we could get his weight up.  A normal 11 month old should weigh around 19 pounds,  Benic weighed 12.5 pounds when I first saw him.  After 5 days of high calorie diet which included “Plumpy Nut”, which is protein high peanut butter, he weight 14.5 pounds.  He looked much better and so we let them go home.  He will follow-up with us at our malnutrition clinic next Thursday, May 3rd.  Let us all pray he continues to increase his

Complications and issues to address.  Looks like I will be busy for a while.   My days have become a little routine of late…but I am sure they will lead to some pretty busy days in the near future.  Up at 6 and down to morning devo at the center of the hospital in the gazebo by 7:30.  Most days I make it a little earlier and check in on each of the patient wards just to say morning greetings and see how many patients we have.  Then I meet with Exavery who is the acting Hospital Secretary (Katibu). We discuss what will be happening today and the items we need to check up on from earlier days. The rest of the day is filled with meeting those who have been asked to do or make some changes to make sure thanks are moving in the right directions.  And, we have some potential hospital plans coming up in the near future which we have also been working on.  I will let you in on those things as we get started.   The hospital was all paper charts when I was here before.  Now they have a computer

Are a great success!   I will admit that traveling from US to Chimala is not as easy for me as it used to be.  It was a long and stressful week as I mentioned last week.  This week, I spent all my time at the hospital re-orienting myself to the daily activities and condition of the hospital.  It was much what I expected and some what I didn’t.    Today, I made a trip with Frank from CSOP to Kapunga to meet 2 children with the same birth defect.  They do not have rectums and therefore have ostomies.  One of the children, Brayan, is  10 years old who lives with his grandmother.  In the Chimala newsletter a few months ago, Brayan was featured with a large abdomen due to a non-functioning ostomy.  Since that article, Brayan has had a large surgery to re-do his ostomy.  We praise the Lord for his full recovery.  The new ostomy is working for now.   However, Brayan has not been going to his follow-up appointments due to the expense.  He also does not go to school and the other children do no