Thursday, 10 September 2015

Tiny Botswana Story #2

I was helping out at the children's clinic the other morning where the mothers bring their children under the age of five every month to be weighed to check for malnutrition. There was a child who was brought in for a post natal care visit following a home birth. He was three months of age, and hadn't gained any weight since the day he was born. If you know anything about tiny babies, it should be that they start packing on the pounds and growing/developing from the moment they enter this world. But this baby wasn't. The mother claimed that both this boy and her other child looked like lizards when they were young. To me, that's a direct consequence of a child being malnourished, but to her, it's a sign of something else. Likely that she or her children have been cursed.

The doctor (he is from DRC) came to see the child. He realized part of the problem was that the mother wasn't producing enough milk because of her diet, so he gave her money out of his own pocket so she could go and buy milk for herself.

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