Yesterday afteroon we admitted a new baby born yesterday morning. The dad walked 6 hours to get here, mom very ill. Saw 100 more patients in clinic. I walked three miles with the kids. Then we had a great birthday with Henley!
We have seen 175 patients so far today. There was a surprise visit from a group. Gave a tour talked to them. Got lunch ready and gave another tour for the team from Feed My staving Children. Great team very encouraging to RHFH. Yeah! The 57 kids in the adult have been fed and are not getting baths. A homeless family outside the gate, now had a rented house for 6 months. Sent 1 child home. That is another free bed for a new one child. On my way to go make a cake.
Lori is about the same. They are giving her medications and will watch her today. Another doctor coming in this afternoon to see her.
Thanks Keverly for this wonderful verse
5-6 God, the one and only—
I’ll wait as long as he says.
Everything I hope for comes from him,
so why not?
7-8 My help and glory are in God
—
9 Man as such is smoke,
woman as such, a mirage.
Put them together, they’re nothing;
two times nothing is nothing.
10 And a windfall, if it comes—
don’t make too much of it.
11 God said this once and for all;
how many times
Have I heard it repeated?
12 Love to you, Lord God!
You pay a fair wage for a good day’s work!
Talked to Lori this AM. She is still having some pain. Tests says she has an infection seems to be talking gall bladder or intestines. They are running more test this AM. Praying that they find the source of this infection and are able to treat it with medication. Keep praying and I will keep you all updated.
Busy day today. 1. clinic -300 people waiting to be seen 2. One day team of 13 from Feed My Staving Children coming for tour and lunch. 3. Henley turns 7 years old today! Have not baked a cake yet! (Keverly I need you 
) 4. I am sure there will be some type of emergency today as well. More later. Keep praying!
Somtimes I wonder what is going on? How much more can a human soul take? Heartache, pain, sickness, death, stress, etc. It seems like it is a daily activity for us now. Just in case you did not know. We are livers here to stay, send what you may, dumb devil, we are here to stay. Got it! Good! Now could we have a day of rest, a day of peace, a day to just be us? A day to laugh? A day to have fun? Those days do not happen very often.
Lori is my best friend, sister, the one who I spend everyday and most evenings with. We can not do this without each other. We cannot. We can make it a few weeks, maybe even a month. We go through every heartache and trial together. When you don’t understand, when our husbands don’t understand, when the culture does not understand, when no one else is there for us, we are there for each other 24/7 every day of the year. What a blessing this is to both of us. God called us to the mission field with our family. Dad is still here working in Haiti, mom went on to heaven, Casey and his wife will be here in a few years. Our husbands and kids are here. A family called together. Okay now I understand why we go through so much. The big D does not like it.
Lori is getting a sonogram now. Hope to know soon what is going on. Hope they find the problem.
She is getting a sonogram now. Pray that they find out what the problem is.
I wanted to ask each of you to pray today for Lori. She woke up this AM with a fever and stomach pains and pains on the right side of her body. Those that know Lori know that she works until she can work no more. She works when she is sick. The pains got worse and Troy and Paige L. came out to Cazale to take her into the hospital. They are on there way right now. We are not sure what it is.
Giliane is doing wonderful on the medika mamba! She is recovering and back to her normal self. She is bossy, sassy and gets in to trouble everyday. We are happy!
Remember Loner? We sent him to our friends up at Haiti Children’s Home. He is doing well and gaining weight! THANK YOU Pat, Melinda and Lori!
Fedline, Rolanda and a small 4 pounds baby died this past week. It has been hard.
This is Rosema. She is 21 months old and weighs 17 pounds 10 ounces. She has a high fever, kwashiorkor, vomiting and diar. She has 4 siblings at home. One other sibling died of kwashiorkor a few years ago.
This is Claudia. She is 4 years old and weighs 27 pounds. She has kwashiorkor. This is her second time with kwashiorkor. She has had two siblings die and she has 9 living siblings.
Kwashiorkor is hard to see in pictures. But these are her feet. They are so swollen with fluids that her toes have burst open in a few places. It is painful.
Swelling in her face.
This foot belongs to Notha. It is a mess and we are going to try and help here. She lives a 5 hours walk away from the clinic so she will stay in the RC while she is healing. She is going to take a long time to heal.
day 1 (someone else applied power to “dry” up the wound)
day two
This is Jonas. He is 3 years old and weighs 31 pounds. He has 8 siblings. He has kwashiorkor.
This is Adeline. She is 2 years old and weighs 14 pounds. She has kwashiorkor, fever, diar, vomiting. She has lost 3 pounds this past month. She is in bad shape.
Loving this song today…
Lyrics to How Great Thou Art: Selah
O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds thy hands hath made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
We are all sad here today. Caroline left this afternoon to return to the US. 
The 7 weeks that she was here went by so quickly. She is an amazing lady that we were honored to have here with us. She helped us out so much with many different projects. She was a true blessing to all the staff here at RHFH! She fell in love with many kids in the RC, some made it and are doing well, some did not make it and went on to heaven. Those moments were hard. But we got through them. We had lots of different injuries and clinic stuff that she really enjoyed. She got to see many patients recover and get well. She was able to follow through with them. When we would go walking in the evenings she would see patients that she had been helping. That was encouraging to all of us. She had a very cool camera and took lots of great pictures for us. She did not complain once. She laughed at me and Loris jokes. She loved on the Ivey family kids. She took care of many patients in the RC. She encouraged and loved on so many people.
This might seem odd to some of you. But the nicest thing she did to help me out was to bath the children that died. She was here for 7 weeks and we had 15 children die. It gets to you, it is hard, really hard when you have so many die in such a short period of time. Several times I was working myself up to go and get them dressed and bathe them and she had already done it for me. How can you tell someone thank you for that? But it meant so much to me. It took a load off of me that maybe she began to understand in her short time here.
I told some of the staff that she was leaving today. They said oh we will remember her just like we remember Keverly! That was such a sweet thing for them to say.
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We are still needing funds for the upcoming semi-container. If you are interested in helping out let us know. licia@realhopeforhaiti.org
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Some questions that have been asked:
Is this an orphanage? How do you ensure that the child will stay healthy when it returns home? What do you give them when they go home?
The Rescue Center is not an orphanage. It is a place where we take in children that are severely malnourished and sick. Most of these children would not make it if they did not get help. Help from us, or their parent or family or another hospital. There have been sick children that have gone to the main general hospital here in Haiti. When their only problem is malnutrition they will NOT admit them. They will send them home and tell them to give them vitamins and feed their child better. We offer an in between place for them to get help. When a child first comes into the clinic, if they are not near death, we try to educate the family on what to do to make the child better. Most do not believe it is just food. They believe many different things cause their child to be this way. It could be a curse someone is putting on them, it could be worms, it could be the dad’s fault, or it could be because they drank bad breast milk. Again, very rarely will they come in and say my child is this way because of lack of food. We talk with them and explain this the best we know how. If we have peanut butter, or milk, or food we will try to give this to them. But this will only put a baid-aid on the problem. If we think the child will die within the next few weeks unless it eats more we will try to find a place in the rescue center. We do the best we can with the resources that we have.
Many children do not make it. Many die. Many suffer. It hurts. It is not fair. It is not right. But…there are so many more that live. That recover. That get well. You can ask anyone in the village about this. They will tell you “Before you came there were little white caskets that went to the grave yard every week. We saw them pass down the road, but now we do not hardly see them.” After being here for so many years change is happening. Imagine a child that had kwashiorkor. The parents believe it was a curse that someone put on their child. They take the child to the vo– do– people to remove the curse. The child get worse. They decide to bring the child to the clinic. The child recovers. They ask me what medicine I gave their child. I say I fed you child, I loved your child, I pray for your child. Jesus helped your child get better. They are amazed. They are happy. They take the child back up to the village. They tell the neighbors that come to see the child what happened. No one needs to say much. They know that God had something to do with it. Many families have accepted Christ this way. That have burned their vo-do- items and turned to Christ.
When the child is well, I send them home. I need room and beds for others that are sicker. I give the parents the education on what to feed their child. I tell them everything I can think of to just get them to feed them. Even if they can only find one eggs every other day. You have to sit and talk and find out where they live, what they have. What produce they can find. It does not make much sense to tell someone to buy cheese, PB and meat for the child when this is something that they have never been able to find. Do we ensure that a child remain healthy. NO, these are not our children. We love them, we do what we can. If a parent wants to take there child home and let it die in front of them. They have that right—it is THEIR child not mine. That is not what I want but it has happened. I cannot call child protective services on them. They do not have that here. Sometimes we think that “our ways” are better and we have more “knowledge”. We can give this child more. I have heard many say that. But just cause someone is “poor” in our eyes does not mean they are poor. They are not poor in their eyes. It does not mean that you need to “save” them by giving them money or things like that. That is not the solution. I have found over the 15 years that I have been here that people watch you. They watch to see how you treat people. They watch to see how you live. They watch to see if you live and follow Christ. They have had foreigners come for years here. But many are in and out. It hard to believe someone when they tell you one way to live and they live another. I could tell those parents of malnourished children what to do to save their child. What food to feed them, how to care for them, etc. But the point where I began to see change is when I got on their level. Talking to them, loving them for who they are NOT what “we” think they should be. I could say, you need to give your child meat, it has good protein in it for them. But they might be thinking, yeah white lady, I have never been able to buy meat for my kids…ever. So instead you ask them how things are where they live. What food they usually eat. If it is one meal of plain white rice a day (sometimes only every other day) then start there. Ask them what things they grow in there area. Spinach, beans, eggplant, leafy greens? Okay so now ask them if they would consider taking a pack of spinach that they grow in their garden for the family and not taking it to sell. Ask them to add the spinach to the rice. They say okay. Then push a little more and see if they would consider adding a cup of beans. These two small things will improve the child’s health. You tell them that and say it will be good for them and the whole family. Then ask if they have a chicken. If yes, then would they be willing to keep an egg every other day to feed the child. Little things like this make a big difference. Remember many that we see each day are in survival mood. If they can take their produce and sell it to buy some rice then that is what they will do. Many times it is not because they are uneducated, it is because they are thinking I could feed my 5 children these 5 eggs or I could take these 5 eggs and sell them to buy some white rice. They amount of rice that they could buy would fill the kids up more and that is what they are thinking. How can they stretch the money farther to fill their bellies.
I believe that change is happening in our area. People are learning that a kid is swollen and sick with kwashiorkor because they need to eat more foods with proteins. They need to eat a balanced diet. When they see this with their own eyes they believe it. Telling them is one thing but showing them is another. Giving them “hand out” of food or things is okay. But it does not fix the problem it just makes them more dependent on you. They need to understand what food to feed their kids. They need to care and they need to do it. Not me. We do what we can with the resources that we have. We would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to have a larger place for the RC. A place where we could separate the sick from the well kids. A place for them to play outside. More toys, disposable diapers, cute little outfits, running water. But that is not what we have right now. We are doing what we can with what we have. If there is room to lay a bed down on the floor for a child to lay on we have room. Several months ago I went and put the supplies out at night and when I walked out of the supply room we put the beds down where I had just walked. That was getting full for me. We wish that we could fix everything and that there would be no hungry, pain and suffering. But that is not going to happen. The wonderful Haitian people that we serve have to BEGIN to do it. They have to and they are. A little at a time things are improving.
Is it hard to send the kids home? YES! Many times it is. But I am used to it I guess. Really it is not about me, or a host family, or a visitor that falls in love with a child. It is about the child and HIS family. What is best for them and what makes them happy and healthy. No strings attached, I do this for them because that is what I am supposed to do, that is what I am called to do. Many kids I do not see again ever. I might hear news about them. But many times I do not. That is okay with me. A parent would have to take a day out to come and see us. They would lose a day in the garden or a day selling produce in the markets. They would have to walk many hours. Sometimes when we are walking someone will walk by and ask if we remember them. Then they tell us they are the mother, father, uncle, aunt etc. of a child that was in the RC. They tell us how much they appreciate all we did. A few weeks back we had a child that was in the RC many years ago come up to us. I did not even know who they were, they looked great, they were healthy and smiling from ear to ear. They said “I will never forget what you did for me”. That my friends is enough to keep me going for years to come.
Psalm 117:2 (NIV)
2 For great is his love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.
Praise the LORD.
It’s a girl! Go and read her story here.
Medika mamba is changing four boys lives go and see here.
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Si ou prese twop, ou p’ap vanse.
If you hurry too much, you won’t advance. Meaning: Take it easy, one step at a time.
Sel pa konn vante di l’ sale.
Salt doesn’t brag that it is saltly. Meaning: Those who are truly good at what they don’t need to brag.
kozman mande chez
Conversation begs a chair. Meaning: A good conversation requires sitting down.
Se je pa we bouch pa pale
What the eye does not see, the mouth does not speak. Meaning: Be certain before you speak
Bonjou se pospo ou.
Good Morning is your passport. Meaning: Good manners will get you anywhere. 
We had a few donations com ein th is weekend for the up coming semi container. We are still needing help to make this possible. Please if you are intertested let us know. $250.00 can sponsor a whole pallet. licia@realhopeforhaiti.org
20“Because you’re not yet taking God seriously,” said Jesus. “The simple truth is that if you had a mere kernel of faith, a poppy seed, say, you would tell this mountain, ‘Move!’ and it would move. There is nothing you wouldn’t be able to tackle.”
3-5There’s more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!
(The lady in the picture above comes each week to pray for us and the children in the RC)
