(December 17, 2010 - by Ralph Kurtenbach) It was the mother's face that spoke to an Ecuadorian nurse about the seriousness of the condition of a little girl lying on the cholera cot before them.
The mother, who only speaks Creole, had brought her baby daughter to Bercy, a city near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where cholera has reached epidemic proportions in recent weeks.
"She was able to transmit through the expression of despair in her face-and her gestures-her desire that I save this piece of her heart," wrote María Isabel Manguia, a nurse who serves with HCJB Global Hands in Quito, Ecuador. She was part of the sixth medical team from Ecuador to visit Haiti since the devastating quake last January.
The girl lay on the cot, malnourished, her body flaccid. "At first I thought she was dead. Her skin was so cold-as cold as ice. She was rigid and unresponsive even to pain," said Manguia. "But when I listened for a heartbeat I heard an almost imperceptible pulse that gave me hope."
Once an IV was started, the little one began to respond-the "Lazarus effect" as it is called by those HCJB Global Hands workers returning from short-term trips to Haiti where the mission works with Samaritan's Purse.
"I was happy to see the little spark of life that still remained begin to increase rapidly. Her sunken eyes and her skull-like face were transforming," Manguia observed. "Her body began once again to move as she raised her hand and sought her mother's arm. In that moment I could see anew how wonderfully loving our divine Creator is."
But team leader Hermann Schirmacher is new to all of this. He can wire an office for electricity, establish computer networks and do a host of other things. However, watching someone die is another matter for the husky, jovial German, on his third trip to Haiti in the last nine months.
"One of our patients was a 70-year-old man who never recovered from the damage of the cholera bacteria," he wrote, "After having received four liters of fluids, he passed away. Tears filled our eyes and sadness gripped our hearts."
"Today my heart breaks for a child," Schirmacher also wrote, adding that he attempts to keep emotions in check so his work is not affected. "The case of Emilien was different," Schirmacher said of a 7-month-old boy whose father brought him to the cholera clinic at Bercy.
"His pulse was weak and he had cholera. The mom had died two months earlier leaving the father as a single parent with three children," he wrote.
"I'm going to prepare a letter so the child can be delivered to someone who can take care of him," the father told Schirmacher. "I can only take care of the 4-year-old and the 7-year-old."
Orphanages in Haiti have many children whose parents were victims of either the January 2010 earthquake or the cholera outbreak of late October.
Working in the patient triage area, Manguia has been training to start IVs, and a Haitian nurse named Maxi has been a quick study on the procedure. She, in turn, has begun training others. This is critical as Manguia and the team will soon head back to Ecuador, where she's a head nurse in the emergency room at Hospital Vozandes-Quito.
Manguia wrote to her own little girl in Ecuador, "My dearest daughter Genesis, I am doing what you asked: 'Save the dark-skinned people, Mommy. Save a whole bunch of them!'"
Source: HCJB Global
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