Raleigh,
North Carolina,
United States
Monday, December 1, 2008
Hi everyone. I made it home safely after a very bumpy flight from Senegal to Atlanta. Several people were throwing up on the plane and, lucky me, I was in the back seat next to the bathrooms so I got to hear it all! Anyway, my last week at Open Arms was good, aside from a few minor situations. Claire ended up leaving 2 weeks early because the director has been horrible to her and she couldn't stand him any longer. She was so sad because she's absolutely in love with the children and she wanted to spend the rest of her time with them. I went out on a project last Tuesday with my American friends, Jay and Billy. They set up a clinic each day of the week in a different location and they do check-ups for moderately to severely malnourished children. I helped them with the severely malnourished children on Tuesday. We weighed, measured them, and assessed them to see if they have edema. I recorded their weight, wrote comments on their forms, and delivered messages to the nurse. A few children had to be sent straight to the hospital because they were in such poor condition. After their check-ups, we needed to watch several of the children (who have lost weight this week) eat the chiponde (basically, fortified peanut butter used to get malnourished children back to health...This is distributed to all of the patients each visit and every child's progress is carefully monitored) to make sure that they are actually eating it and not throwing it back up. After that, the chiponde was distributed to all of the mothers. Some of the mother's didn't show up with their children that day, so we needed to go out into the villages to search for some of them to make sure that the child hadn't died or that they didn't need to be rushed to the hospital. It took us 3 hours to find 2 children because all of the roads are horrible, bumpy, dirt roads that are almost impossible to drive down, and of course, there are no street names. We needed to stop every couple of minutes to ask the local villagers if they have heard of the people that we were looking for, until we got lucky, then that villager would jump in the car with us and show us where to go. The first family that we were looking for moved to Malawi's central region in order to farm, so they could have food. The second family that we found was a very young mother (no more than 15 years old) with a baby named Tadola. We had to bring them to the hospital because both of them were very sick. They both had the same eye infection and the mother could not see. She was in very poor health and we took her to get an HIV test. The whole day was a great experience and it is something that I'll never forget. We got a new baby named Alex last week who was 3 weeks old. His mother brought him in and it was the first time in history that something like that has happened. All of the other children's mothers are dead. This woman has HIV and didn't want to pass it on to Alex through her breast milk, so Open Arms is taking care of him for a while. He ended up in the hospital for the last 5 days, along with Mary, who both have diarreha and vomiting. They both came back on Friday and have lost a lot of weight. Alex is very dehydrated and the front portion of his head is sunken in. Also, when you pinch the skin on his belly, it just stays pinched because he is so deyhdrated. That's what Bernald was like in the days before he passed away, so I really hope that Alex will be ok. Neville, the director at Open Arms, got Malaria on Wednesday, so he wasn't there for the rest of my stay. I stayed with Ireen on Thursday and Friday night, then on Saturday, the ladies at the orphanage had a going away ceremony for me, Amanda, and Margaret. They sang songs, danced, and gave speeches to thank us for all of our help. It was really nice, but a lot of the women were crying when they were hugging us goodbye, so it was a little sad. I spent the last hour with Rosie and Sarah on my lap, playing with them, hugging and kissing them, and making them laugh. Rosie fed me the last bit of her peanut butter sandwich that she had been saving in her little hand for the last hour and a half. She kept breaking off crumbs and putting them in my mouth and she would smile so big every time I ate a piece. She was hugging me so tight all morning and then she actually gave me a real kiss for the first time ever! It's like she knew I was leaving. It was hard to say goodbye. When I went to the Harrogate house to say goodbye to those kids, they kept giving me loads of hugs and kisses and telling me that they will talk to me on the phone after I leave. I told them I'd call them in 2 days and they were so excited. I actually just got off the phone with them a few hours ago. I talked to each and every one of them. Ireen told me that they keep asking her if I am going to come see them each day. Neville, even though he was sick with Malaria, drove us to the airport on Saturday, and Ireen took a mini bus from her house to meet me at the airport. When I talked to her on Sunday from Atlanta, she told me that she cried when my plane took off and some of the locals were laughing at her and asking her why she's crying! She told them "because my best friend is leaving me". Poor thing! Now my plan is to work day and night through August or September in order to save enough money to go back to Africa again. I can't wait.
