Healthcare...

One of the saddest things that I see here (and I don’t mean saddest as in the worst) is kids with deformed feet. Today I saw two kids with deformed feet. One is a little girl and the other is a teenage boy. They both have feet that turn inside and curl so they actually walk on the tops of their feet. From what I understand this is fairly easily correctable with special shoes when they are still babies. But not here.
Yesterday Ritha told me that someone, a doctor, came around to their area and said that everyone had to take medicine for elephants foot disease (elephantiasis). Apparently there is a “new” mosquito that carries the disease so they want to make sure that people don’t get it. From what I understand, you need to take the medicine about once a month for two years in order to get proper protection. I wonder who’s going to make sure that each person is actually taking it when they’re supposed to and for the proper length of time? Hmmm.... Again, from what I understand, the disease is primarily found in interior villages and is passed by mosquitos or by walking barefoot in infected soil.
Some folks we know who are in the process of getting a house set up interior so they can live and work there, are currently nursing a little interior girl back to health. The guy was out trekking around in the jungle in the area they will live in and heard about a little girl who was very sick. He happens to be a nurse (among other things) and so he decided to go find this girl. He hiked for an entire day in the rain to get to her. She is two years old (or so they think as she has all her teeth) but only weighed 14 pounds. She was suffering from lice, malaria, whipple worm (I think that's how you spell it) and a prolapsed rectum. She was in really bad shape. So they called in the helicopter to bring her out. Her parents are still living in the stone age literally as they still garb themselves in leaves and grass and have bones protruding from their noses and ears. They could not be convinced to go along with their daughter, they were simply too scared. This couple that took her in have a Papuan lady who helps them out with some of their teaching and so she is taking care of the sick little girl out here so far away from her family. She's doing much better now as all her illnesses have been treated and she's eating a lot more than she ever has in her whole little life. I went to see her the other day and she can't even walk by herself, her little legs are too weak. Had this couple not been determined to find her, she would have died. These are some of the people MAF serves. Sometimes the helicopter is needed to get them out of the jungle, but as soon as they are at an airstrip, MAF can come and get them.