Wheelchairs

Hi!,
Just a continuation on that previous short blog…

The wheelchairs have been appreciated!   Rainha had not been going to school and was just dragging herself around her house in the dirt when we got here. Now we’ve been taking her out a few times a week, she was even on the stage singing at her church. Manda, Octavia (who is a long term missionary that cares for Rainha) and I wake up at 4.30am Mondays and Fridays and take her down to the beach for some hydrotherapy. We have to go at that time because the wheelchair draws too much attention and we’d be mobbed by hundreds of kids. We still draw some attention even at 5.30 when we arrive at the beach. It’s a 20 min walk, and of course it takes time to load her in and out of the chair and make it up and down the terrain here on the compound. Nothing is easy or smooth running here, but this chair is far better then any other one would have been.

We also have Carinho, an 8-year-old village friend who we believe has cerebral palsy among other disabilities. Anyway, he looks about five and he has a really enlarged head which apparently common when mothers are malnourished during pregnancy.  So he also cant use his feet or hands. His hands are getting worse, his fingers are curled in and his condition is deteriorating. Doctor Ange from the mission base looked at him and said that medically, this condition will just get worse and worse until he dies.

Some naughty village boys we know from a year ago came with us on our first visit to Carinho’s mud hut. His mother works in the kitchen at Arco-Iris five days a week. She’s a sweet Macua lady, only 25 and I love her!  It was Manda's idea to bring them a wheelchair from Australia.   I told her she was crazy to take ANOTHER chair as well as the first one, as it was very hard to transport it across and involved lots of letters asking for leniency from Singapore airlines, but now its here.  I’m so glad she didn’t listen to me…Carinho is so happy, and it has been amazing just to see his face light up.

I took him swimming the other day. He never usually speaks, but he just talked and talked the whole time I was in the water with him.  I only wish I had worked out some before I came here so my arms could cope with the weight of carrying a child for longer. The African mamas are strong!

So that’s just a really brief update on the wheelchairs. Some people have become very angry with us for not buying them wheelchairs and they’re jealous that we’ve helped the others.  So wish we could have brought more...  As it was, not only did we spend all the cash we personally had to buy them and get them on the planes here, but others kindly donated money to purchase them also.   I can't even imagine finding enough people to donate enough for more wheelchairs.  The need here is huge.


Christy

Planning to go again

This time a year ago, I was living in a humble home shared by eight others, who were similarly embarking on a life journey that would answer the calling of a 'drum' that was beating in our hearts too loudly to be ignored. After months of showering from a bucket of dirty water, months of being served goat entrails, rice and beans (with bugs and rocks), months of facing digestive problems, scabies, malaria, ant bites, snakes and spiders, and months of 40 degree heat... I can still hear the African 'drum' that beats within.  I am not 'dying' to get back to Africa any more, but I am living to get back to the land of mud huts and banana leaved roofs.

 At the orphanage many are broken and abused, hurt and dying, confused and inconsolable. They have never seen any example of true unconditional love and often, particularly in the children who first arrive at a centre, they just cry, bite, or kick or scream. One little boy I met last time in the toddlers house at Iris was about three, and he had never once smiled, spoken or shown any expression but utter sadness on his face for months of being there. No one knows what happened to him to have caused so much sadness. I desperately hope to see a change in him next month when I arrive back there.

Amanda my missionary friend and I, are nearly ready to leave for the cruel but beloved continent to embrace the culture and to befriend the unlovely. 

The tentative plan is to spend six weeks at the Arco Iris mission base in Pemba. Soon after the new year, I travel north to Dar Es Salaam -Tanzania, then by bus pass through Nairobi -Kenya and into Kampala -Uganda. From Kampala, Uganda's capital.  I will then head south to Kamuli and will be staying at a very basic orphanage. Some of the children there have come out of the Lords Resistance Army and have endured that of the most immense suffering that humanity can face. I am so looking forward to meeting them. 


Christy