Thought a few times before posting this blog, but here it is after all.
Visited the Children’s hospital feeding centre on Friday – only place in Freetown that admits and manages severely malnourished children. And with severely malnourished I mean just that, entrance criteria is much lower (or is it higher) than we ever had in SA.
On Fridays we sometimes visit there just to see how patients we referred were doing. Sometimes good news, often not. Friday, due to unusually good traffic flow, we arrived there earlier than usually – just as they were doing the weigh-in. It’s amazing how much clothes can generally conceal. Here were 15 kids all naked - mostly skin and bones and a few puffy with kwashiorkor. I could not get myself to take picture of them – although I’m sure they would have made it into some newspaper before Christmas time.
I’m used to seeing malnourished and underweight children – after all spent 6 years in a Barberton’s children’s ward. But this is different, in Barberton we would maybe one or two a month admit a little one with pure malnutrition – usually the kids had HIV and/or TB and a lot of the weight loss was more due to disease that pure lack of food. But here AIDS isn’t that common. Here just poverty, poor (almost non-existent) health care and absolute ignorance of what a child needs is at the forefront.
This time we actually went to hand out something small for Christmas, but even though the mother, grannies or aunties that was there with the children looked grateful, there wasn’t much joy in it. Mothers gladly smile for photos afterwards - for some of them possibly the last ever to be taken.
A little silver lining around the cloud of that day was at least 2 happy babies, ready to go home after spending a more than a month in the centre.
The one in the picture was being discharge – and definitely looks like she and Mom both discovered the wonderful benefits of breastfeeding.
On Fridays we sometimes visit there just to see how patients we referred were doing. Sometimes good news, often not. Friday, due to unusually good traffic flow, we arrived there earlier than usually – just as they were doing the weigh-in. It’s amazing how much clothes can generally conceal. Here were 15 kids all naked - mostly skin and bones and a few puffy with kwashiorkor. I could not get myself to take picture of them – although I’m sure they would have made it into some newspaper before Christmas time.
I’m used to seeing malnourished and underweight children – after all spent 6 years in a Barberton’s children’s ward. But this is different, in Barberton we would maybe one or two a month admit a little one with pure malnutrition – usually the kids had HIV and/or TB and a lot of the weight loss was more due to disease that pure lack of food. But here AIDS isn’t that common. Here just poverty, poor (almost non-existent) health care and absolute ignorance of what a child needs is at the forefront.
This time we actually went to hand out something small for Christmas, but even though the mother, grannies or aunties that was there with the children looked grateful, there wasn’t much joy in it. Mothers gladly smile for photos afterwards - for some of them possibly the last ever to be taken.
A little silver lining around the cloud of that day was at least 2 happy babies, ready to go home after spending a more than a month in the centre.
The one in the picture was being discharge – and definitely looks like she and Mom both discovered the wonderful benefits of breastfeeding.
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