Children's Respite Home & Outreach Project, Haiti

This week we'll be working with Team Canada: Healing Hands for Haiti, to help distribute over 100 children’s wheelchairs for kids across North Haiti!  Most of the children who'll get these chairs will have never received a wheelchair before, and it's literally going to transform their lives!

Another little one whose life has been dramatically transformed in the last few weeks thanks to your care, is Judeline.  Judeline was abandoned at our Pediatric Unit about 6 months ago, severely malnourished and suffering from hydrocephalus (which is a condition where fluid builds on the brain.)  Through our respite home, we've provided her with a foster mum who lovingly comes to the hospital every day to provide care for Judeline.  Her love and dedication is wonderful and inspiring to see.  However, due to her condition, it's been a hard and slow fight to save her.

However, two weeks ago we received a specialist speech therapist from the UK, who spent hours working with Judeline to help her start feeding.  After lots of delicate support, our volunteer helped Judeline feed for the first time!  She's now steadily improving, as we try and increase her strength so she can move from the hospital to our respite scheme.

Judeline is just one of two new children who've sadly been abandoned into our care in the last few months.  We have amazing foster families who want to care for these children, but would greatly value your support enabling us to equip them with the resources to do so.  Please continue to help us provide this critical care.

Links:

• Join us on FACEBOOK today!

Thanks to your incredible support, our respite home continues to flourish!  It's not only the children who are supported, but their parents to.

In the last month, one of the most desperate mothers we've met has started working at the respite centre, and its changed her life!  We first met her when she was living as a single mum with her profoundly disabled child, in an old dis-used school as a squater.  Their room was tiny...a dimly lit, bare concrete shack, with hardly any light.  On one occassion we found her there, literally close to death, having had an emergency maternity situation at home without any support.  For some she was a hopeless case, literally living on the edge of life every day, in a dark room which her child hardly ever left.  Often she would dissapear, as she was kicked out of one place, and moved on to another.  A lonely, isolated figure, with no support. 

However, thanks to your support, this little families future has been transformed.  Her child is getting respite care with us, and she's now working for the centre!  Our community team have also found her a local family to live with, so she has a permanent home, a community to support her, and a job to provide a future for her and her child.  The joy, pride and hope re-ignited within this mother is incredibly moving.  In this case, it was not only a child who you helped save, but a mother also.

If our community team hadn't visited her house after that maternal emergency, she may well have died.  We are passionate about kids and their mums!  In fact, the majority of the children we care for have been left disabled because their mums gave birth at home without any medical support.  We're looking to change this, and have recently launched our Christmas campaign - A Royal Birth, which is seeking to give mothers and babies a safe birth this Christmas.  Please visit www.aroyalbirth.org to find out how you can help save more women and children today.  We need your help.

Links:

• Visit our Christmas campaign site today!