Where there is no doctor

Day two of our Farming God’s Way, (FGW), training has gone well. Yesterday we holed out, (dug all our holes and furrows). Today we planted out and covered the plot with leaves, twigs and grass, (mulch or God's Blanket). We have planted in faith, prayed for a good harvest and rain and – guess what – as I type we are having exactly the right type of rain. A gradual downpour - not too heavy and designed to really soak into our mulch. An encouraging start. Today were also the day for the science bit – demonstrations of the why behind not ploughing and using mulch. The demonstrations worked well on the training DVD, were obviously doable in the field because we did them in Lesotho and they worked on our plot today. The next step, (apart from the bumper harvest!), is to make sure that the team I have just trained can do the same for our church members.

I’ve written before about the ‘playing at God’ problem of our work. Making the right response to people’s requests for assistance is very challenging. Making sure we don’t create dependency but at the same time being compassionate is a really difficult juggling act. A young mum came to see us late this afternoon with a very young child suffering from severe malnutrition. Instinctive response is to rush the child to hospital but that didn’t feel right in this case. Further investigation revealed the fact that this lady had a younger baby, one month old, (which is why the older child was no longer being breast fed), and a husband who had just started a new job. Our standard reference for a second opinion in cases like this is a remarkable book called “Where there is no doctor”, which is specially designed for situations where there is no doctor! The child had the classic symptoms of kwashiorkor – swollen legs, sores, bulging tummy, and swollen face. We decided to invest in the ingredients of a local ‘super food’, which mothers in our area use to build children up. Creating this wonder food involved a trip to the market in Kosele to buy some Omena, (small dried fish) for the food mix, vitamin tablets and an anti-biotic. The other ingredients were available from our stores - rice, groundnuts and porridge flour. As we don’t have a blender the ingredients were sent to the local posho mill to be ground into flour.  While all this was happening the little lad happily munched a few bananas and was already starting to look like he had perked up.

The lady and child will be coming to see us on Saturday for a progress report and we are confident that there will be a significant improvement. I’m sure that we made the right decision but it’s not easy. What if we got it wrong? I’m sure the lady will be back quickly if the child takes a serious turn for the worse. Then we can start to consider the alternatives. In the meantime we can only pray for the child and for wisdom the next time we find ourselves in the same situation.