You might not believe these photos

In the image above, you will see the baby on the right is 5-week-old Nicholas Vilkati (son to our nurse Hannah).  He weighs 12-pounds and is 21 inches long.

Beside him on the left is baby Lethu who arrived to us last week.  She is 14-months-old and weighs 12-pounds, just like Nicholas. She is a few inches longer, but they are basically the same size.

Below is a photo with a third baby in it and her name is Rejoice. She came to us as a newborn and was born just three days before Lethu, so that photo shows the size that Lethu should be if she had proper nutrition from birth. 

This is classic malnutrition, with stunting associated with it.  According to the WHO, "Stunting is the impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation."  We have a chronic problem in the Kingdom of eSwatini of children not having enough food or not enough nutritious food for proper development. When Lethu came to us last week she had not eaten in days.  It’s hard for most people reading this blog to imagine that, but we are seeing it more and more.

We continue to provide hot meals to thousands of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC’s) through our 30 church partners each month.  Our partnerships with Feed My Starving Children and the International Egg Commission/Foundation make this possible.  But now we are also providing food to other small orphanages, halfway house and social welfare offices so that they have food to give people who come in begging for help.

I wish I could say that things are getting better here, but it seems that they are not.  On Thursday we were in the southern part of the country and drove through river beads that were bone dry, despite the rains we have had lately. 

Below is a chart with some staggering statistics that was presented to a group of stakeholders who are caring for the OVC’s of the nation.

Please join us in praying for this nation, for the children who are suffering and for the young mothers who have to do unfathomable things to provide for their children.

Live from eSwatini … come Lord Jesus, come.

Janine

Just tears

These two girls are the same age (20-months).

This week has been filled with tears.  Tears for starving children, tears for children who are being hunted so that can be cut apart and sacrificed by a Traditional healer (witch doctor) to allegedly give people power, tears for helpless and hopeless teenagers who are being raped and impregnated by an enemy, tears of hopelessness.

Yesterday we received two children, a girl and a boy. I was told that two girls were coming, because that is what the mentally disabled/drunkard/abusive father told social welfare.  When social welfare picked up the children and found the eldest to be a boy, he asked the father about it and his response was, “I didn't know I had a boy”.  The child is THREE YEARS OLD and has been living with his father since last August … and he didn’t know he was a boy.

The youngest child is a girl. She is 20-months-old and weighs 13.4 pounds (6.1 KG). 

Each day that father would lock the two children outside his mud hut and go drinking. When he arrived home at night, drunk, they would move inside. Neighbors alerted social welfare and when they arrived at the home the little girl was almost dead from starvation. They were both rushed to hospital and have been treated there. Yesterday they came home to Project Canaan. She is the size of a 4-month-old and the 3-year-old does not walk well, and doesn’t speak. We have a policy of not accepting children over the age of two, but the father told social welfare that the children were ages one and two.  He didn’t know he had a boy and had no idea of their ages.  We made an exception.  I wept.

We always pray over the children as soon as they arrive, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t speak.  How can this happen in 2018?  How can this happen where we live?

We have received nine children in 2018.  Six of them arrived severely malnourished, two were newborns (product of teenage rape) and the last one is a child who was called an “animal” and was being hunted.  I can’t go in to any more detail on that story for privacy and security reasons, but it is THE MOST EVIL story I have heard to date.

I know that Jesus is our only hope, and I cling to that each and every day. Some days are just harder than others.

Please pray for our staff. We have a lot of children who are in desperate need of healing, love and hope.  We are also in need of more funds for the new children who have arrived and have a steep hill of healing to climb.  Please consider making a one time gift today, or become a monthly donor.  

In the US.

In Canada.

We can’t do this alone.

Live in Swaziland … come Lord Jesus come.

Janine

If we didn’t take the baby, his death would be on our shoulders?

This little 14-month-old boy is a very sick child.

She was 43-years-old and had given birth to nine children.  The health card said that only four were still alive and that the last three died of malnutrition.  A cry for help was sent to the local social welfare office to try to save the 14-month-old boy who was dying from starvation in front of the family.  The neighbors couldn't stand to watch another child die in that family, but had nothing themselves to give.

We left Project Canaan at 7:00AM and drove for 70 minutes to the social welfare office.  From there we started the journey up mountains paths, down valleys, through the bush and stopped at four different homesteads trying to find the child in need.  9.5 hours later we would arrive back home.

At the last homestead we heard a crying baby inside the house and learned that the mother had just left to go find local home brew (marula) to drink away her pain. 

The whole situation was tragic.  We were told by family members that the mentally challenged mother was “feasted on” by her own father and her father’s brother (uncle) and that several of the nine children were fathered by them.  When we finally had all the family members together under a large tree, each of them begged us to take the baby, whom they recently discovered to be HIV positive (but not yet on treatment).    They each shared that if we did not intervene, then the child’s death would be on our shoulders, not theirs (a bit of twisted logic, but that is what they said).  Once the social worker had her report information to get affidavits and a court order, it was time for the Mother and Grandfather to sign the papers that we had allowing us to take the child at that moment.

This was the food that mom and baby shared.

The baby was given black tea to drink.

Neither the mother nor her father could read or write so the document was read to them in siSwati. Then we took an ink pen and scribbled it on their right thumb so that they could make their “mark” with their thumbprint – handing us the baby.  While I have seen that many times, it always jars me back to the reality that we are living in here and what a lack of education can do for the whole family.

Putting ink on mom's thumb so she can "sign" her signature with a mark of ink.

The baby boy is sick, has a bad ear infection and just cries all the time. He is miserable and in pain (possibly going through alcohol withdrawl as he was being breast fed).  But with medication, proper nutrition, proper rest, lots of love and prayer, he will heal, both physically and emotionally.

We arrived back home just before 5:00 PM and 15-minutes later another social worker arrived with a 10-day old baby girl. Her teenage mother had been raped by a neighbor and she didn’t want anything to do with the baby. To make things worse the neighbors were threatening the life of the mother and her baby if she pursued justice against the rapist. The baby was placed with us and they are finding a place of safety for the teenage girl.

Rachelle Ferguson, holding baby Norma (named in memory of Rachelle's mother).

We have 184 tiny souls living at Project Canaan now and at times it is overwhelming to think about our roles in their lives. And why us??  We knew very little about Tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS or malnutrition before we moved here.  We had never done land planning or development, had never raised chickens or dairy cattle or worked in the field of aquaponics.  One of the many things that we have learned is that HE equips those whom He calls, He rarely calls the equipped.  Why? Because this way He gets ALL the glory.

As you celebrate Easter with your family this weekend I ask that you take some quiet time and pray for our children, pray for our staff, and pray for our family. I miss being with Spencer and Chloe on the most important weekend of they Christian calendar, but will enjoy watching our small children act out the Easter play at church tomorrow. Be sure to check out the Heart for Africa Facebook page tomorrow for Easter photo cuteness!

Live from Swaziland … He is risen indeed!

Janine

This was the tiny door that we squeezed through to eventually get the baby boy.

18-month-old baby girl is the size of a 5-month-old

 

This week we welcomed a baby we are calling Dinah.  She is 18-months-old, weighs 7KG (15 pounds) and that is her weight after spending two full months in the hospital being treated for malnutrition. The dietician at the hospital literally brought her back from the brink of death and now it’s our turn to help her begin to grow and develop.

I have learned a LOT about malnutrition over the years, and it’s a complicated condition with long-term effects including physical stunting, direct structural development of the brain, impairment of infant motor development and often results in death, even after being on “food treatment” for weeks or months.

If you look at the chart below, you will see that her length and weight don’t come close to hitting the low end of the child growth chart.  Her length is that of an average 9-month-old, and her weight is that of an average 5-month-old child.  

 

Malnutrition also weakens the immune system resulting in complicated skin conditions that often leave permanent scaring (see photo below).

Malnutrition often results in anemia (low iron in the blood), and where this little one should have a Hemoglobin count of 12+, yesterday it was a mere 6.4.  In the western world she would be given a transfusion with an HB level as low as 7-8, but here we give iron daily, along with a high iron diet filled with spinach and liver if we can get it. 

If her malnutrition wasn’t enough, she also has arrived with severe pneumonia, with labored breathing and has a fever of 103F as I type this blog.  She is hungry and sick and scared and miserable.

Two weeks ago we got another little girl whom we call Cynthia. She is also malnourished and is the same age as Dinah (18-months), but in the photo below you can see the significant difference in the length of their legs and size of their feet and heads. Dinah is clearly much smaller and more underdeveloped.

We have amazing, trained staff who are caring for Dinah, Cynthia and all of our other malnourished children, and we are forever thankful for our nurses Hannah and Anthony. But it takes money, medicine, good food, a lot of tender loving care and a lot of prayer to love these children back to life. Thank you to each and every one of you who supports us on a monthly basis – you are truly ANGELS to us.

If you are not currently supporting our children, but feel moved to do so today, please click on the link below and get started. EVERY dollar helps and we need help today.

In the US click here.

In Canada click here.

Live from Swaziland … please pray for Dinah.

Janine

I refuse to be angry and I refuse to be afraid.

Last week I was angry, as you may have sensed in my blog.  Our house had vandalized, my computer stolen and trust broken. Thank you all for your emails, calls and messages of support. I apologize that I have not responded to many of you, but alas, I have no laptop.   A new one is arriving with my friend David on Monday and then I will start to catch up on two weeks of work.

These past two weeks have been a real journey in our faith.  Neither Ian nor I are fearful people. Heck, we moved to Africa, right?  We have never been afraid in Africa, we have felt safe and protected in the tiny Kingdom of Swaziland, but after our home was vandalized things changed.

After the break in we wouldn’t leave the house without closing the gates and turning on the electric fencing.  We started to hide electronic devices after every use, and our nights became restless, filled with dreams of snakes, polar bears and cars sinking in deep lakes.

Fear is not of the Lord, and each day we would spend time in prayer and in the Word rebuking the fear that had come over us, but we are human, and it lingered.  And we were angry.

I don’t like feeling angry and I really don’t like feeling afraid. Those are two of the absolutely worst emotions for me personally, but we prayed, and prayed and prayed.  I am not sure what happened late last week, but my anger went away, I chose to forgive the thieves who violated our space and it seemed that by releasing my anger, fear was taken away.

In the midst of this emotional and spiritual battle we had three little boys come to live at Project Canaan. All of them arrived severely malnourished.  Little Jesse is 1-year-old, little Barry is 11-months-old and little Jonathan will be 2-years-old on July 27^th.  All three are developmentally delayed, but Jonathan, who arrived yesterday, is in the worst shape.

Jonathan weights 6.5 kg/14 pounds (and yes, he is almost 2-years-old).  He is skin and bones, has a weeping ear infection, a fever, HIV/AIDS related bumps/lumps and skin lesions.  His hemoglobin is 4.9 and his teeth are rotten and disintegrating.  

As I reflect back on my last two weeks, I can’t help but give thanks that I have the privilege of being here in Swaziland and to be chosen to drive and pick up each of these little boys.  I have the privilege to pray over them, cry over them, care for them and love them back to life.  I also have the privilege to care for and love the Aunties and Uncles who do the heavy lifting each and every day.

Fear and anger are not welcome in my life.  I have been freed, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Living aboard is hard at the best of times, but as I often say, living in Africa is not for sissies.

Live from Swaziland … driving to Johannesburg to pick up Chloe from the airport!!!

Janine

What is a "mushroom daycare"? You might not want to know.

You likely haven’t heard of a “mushroom daycare” before.  I had not heard the term until a year ago when we picked up a baby (Margie) from one such “center”.   The reason it is called a “mushroom daycare” is because there are many (literally dozens) of children being cared for in a small, one room building in the dark with no exposure to sunshine, daylight, proper food, stimulation or love.  These children are growing like mushrooms, in the dark.

Please take a moment before reading on to stop and picture that in your mind.

Here is what is happening.  Young woman are getting pregnant often through false promises of love/marriage/free KFC/money and/or and then there is incest and rape.  The “middle age” generation has been wiped out by HIV/AIDS/TB and there is no one to care for the young children back at home (which is typically what happened in the past). The young mothers need to find work so they leave their children with a local “daycare” person, which means an unofficial caregiver takes the children in to her home for a month at a time and the mother should arrive with money at the end of the month when they are paid.

Sometimes the young mother just runs away and never returns, leaving more mouths to feed with less money. But how does the caregiver find the mother?  Sometimes the mothers come and pay the daycare lady a small amount of money and then go back to work, leaving the children living in the dark.

The result is an uncountable number of children living like mushrooms around the country.  I hope I don’t get in trouble for writing this, as it is a well-known problem to the police, hospitals and social welfare, with action being taken, but it’s a huge challenge, in a country with lots of other challenges.  No one wants the children being left at home alone, so what other alternative is there?  I believe this is a direct result of a missing generation.

Yesterday we welcomed a baby whom we call Wendy.  She started off life in a bad way, arriving three months early in her mother’s mud hut, weighing only 3.2 pounds.  But she lived.  Her young mother had no family to help care for the baby (and her other two children) so she sent the 4 and 7-year old to other homes and then took Baby Wendy to a local “daycare”.    The baby got very little food, nutrition, care or love.  She started to stop growing and was always sickly. 

15-month-old baby weighing 6.6 pounds

When Baby Wendy was 15-months-old (this past April) the mother took the child to a government hospital that has a wonderful pediatrician and nutritionist who specialize in malnutrition.   At that age, Wendy weighed only 6.6 pounds.  After two months of specialized nutritional care, medical care and a lot of love, Wendy was ready to be discharged.  But the care that the mother could provide wouldn’t be any better than what she had already given, so she begged for help. 

We brought home the 17-month-old baby and she weighed 14.5 pounds (the size of a 5-month-old).  It was a heartbreaking moment for all, but joy-filled at the same time because now Wendy has hope for her future. 

17-month-old baby now weighs 14.5 pounds

The nutritionist shared with me that she had lost 15+ babies so far this year, in that small rural hospital, due to babies coming in too malnourished to come back from the brink of death.  She shared her pain and her frustration that these deaths were preventable.

Another government official told me that she had found a “mushroom daycare” recently with 40 small children living in the room, under the table, just lying on the floor.  They are working diligently to shut these unofficial daycares down, but what is the alternative?  I simply don’t know the answer, but I do ask you to pray for the front line people who are dealing with these real life situations every day, and rarely have a viable solution to provide.

Today we have 158 children under the age of 7-years old living at Project Canaan.  We need your help more than ever. If you can help give monthly, please sign up to be a Heart for Africa Angel in the US or Canada.

If you want to help us today, please shop on our Amazon registries in either the US or Canada and send little Wendy diapers and wipes.  Every dollar spent helps us reduce our operating costs for these little ones.

Please pray for our staff who are tasked with the enormous responsibility of helping each of our children heal with special care and a lot of love.  As my friend Denise said last week, we are “loving them back to life”.  Amen.

Live from Swaziland … I am praying for all the mushroom babies in the country.

Janine

Confusion, lies and a new set of twins end up in the hospital

This was a whirlwind week beginning with a call from the Social Welfare department on Monday

morning saying there were three babies in desperate need.  We were already awaiting the arrival of a newborn (who at the time of this writing has still not appeared, despite an October 4^th delivery date).

I was told that one of the babies was a newborn and was dropped in a pit latrine (I never get used to typing those words), but was not ready to be released from the hospital.  The others were 9-month old twins who were in a very serious situation (not to suggest that being dropped in a pit latrine is NOT a serious situation!).  Tuesday Helen and I made the drive to Siteki to visit the baby in hospital and pick up the twins.

The mother of the baby gave birth in a pit latrine that had not been finished yet.  I never thought that I would write this, but unfortunately there were no feces/urine in the pit latrine to catch the baby when it landed, and instead the child hit his tiny newborn head on the bottom of the 6’ deep hole.  The mother left the child and it was only 12 hours later that he was found by a family member who heard his cry. It is a miracle that this baby is still alive, but not without injury.  He has several large wounds on his head and an abscess of some kind (the size of my fist), so we will not receive him from the hospital until the surgeons are finished and confident in his recovery.

From there we drove to the office to pick up the 9-month-old twins. I am not quite sure how to explain what transpired in the minutes to come, other than to say that there was a lot of confusion, there were lies, and then suddenly we had a set of twins in the car.  Their story took twists and turns that started with them looking like they were 18-24 months old and ended with them not even looking like siblings or the same age (let alone twins – neighbors maybe?).  The problem is that our policy is to only intake children under the age of 12 months because there is such a great need here in Swaziland for a home for little babies.  We want to have space for children of that age when a hospital or Social Welfare office needs to place a baby.  Secondly, the little ones come with much less hurt and emotional challenges than the older ones, and so our first children can be the leaders of the younger ones in the future.

But God is God, His plans are not our (my) plans, and He cheated and tricked me. I was “hoodwinked” as Ian told me later.

The children were living 100 km from Siteki, which is a 90-minute drive from Project Canaan. The police were the ones who reported that the children had been abandoned, so they were asked to drive the babies to Siteki and we would meet them there “half way” so to speak. By the time we arrived, the police had dropped the babies at the government office and turned back home. We looked at the children and laughed because they were walking, likely talking and had a full set of teeth!  I told the Social Worker that there was no way that these children were 9-months old and she insisted that is what she had been told. Well, maybe that is what she had been told, but there was NO way that was the truth.

 

Then there was the confusion. The Aunt of the children was the one who told the police that the mother had abandoned the children at her front door step when she wasn’t there (in fact she didn’t arrive home for three more days!).  The father of the children is HIV positive and has fathered 22 other children, to her knowledge, and was focused on passing on the deadly disease to as many women as he could before he passed away.  He is living in South Africa now.  When we asked how the boy was so very dark and the girl so very light, we were told, “Oh, the mother is a Zulu and the father is Afrikaans, that is why”.  Oh brother.  That might be true, but the mother is not a cat!

And then it got worse.  What are the children’s names?  Well, the Aunt didn’t know because she hadn’t seen the babies in six months, so she named them Rose and Gabriel. Why those names?  Because the girl was as pretty as a rose, and the boy would be protected by the angel Gabriel.

I told the Social Welfare officer that I really didn’t think these children qualified to come to El Roi as they were too old, but she assured me that they were less than one year and I couldn’t say no.  Where else would they go?  And so Rose and Gabriel, our “twin 9-month old babies” came to El Roi that night and it became their home.  They are actually 22-months old, the eldest children at the El Roi home for abandoned babies.  (Just for the record, I do believe that my friend at Social Welfare had no idea that the children were more than a year when she first called me.  She was only working from information the police had given her).

We have some issues with these beautiful children. They are angry, afraid, very hungry and both showing signs of severe malnutrition.   While they look round and plump, they are suffering “Kwashiorkor,” a form of malnutrition that is caused by inadequate protein.  In fact, yesterday afternoon we had to admit them to the hospital because their condition is acute and in the final stages (life threatening) according to malnutrition doctors here in Swaziland.  They will be there for 10 -14 days and that means that a caregiver from the El Roi baby home must be with them 24 hours a day.  There is no question that they have been abandoned before and mistreated based on how they cling to/fight for food, scrounge for tiny kernels of rice left on the floor even after they have had a full meal, and how they will bite in self-defense even when self-defense is not required. 

We have a long road ahead with all of these children, but we know that the Creator of the Universe and God who SEES them has brought us all together and He will make the way straight as we continue to seek His will and direction.

Thank you for reading this blog and for your continued support and prayers.  I can honestly say that I am at peace about what we are doing here and I believe that I have the best job in the whole world.  The rains are starting to fall again, the vegetables are being harvested and sold, and the babies are starting to crawl and walk. God is good and I am thankful.

Live from Swaziland…we have 14 babies!

Janine

PS - Just want to shout out to Beth Blaisdell, Kim Kennedy, Pam McReynolds and Sherri Troyer from the US Bank who were visiting this week and were a huge gift in assisting with many moving parts and sick children.  Special thanks to Beth and Kim who did "night shift" at El Roi last night with Helen while Thabile was doing night shift at the hospital.  We are so thankful for your hearts and hands.