Our friends Richard and Florence above have moved house to a mud house with thatched roof (which is still very wet and cold) The NZ Mission team from Riverbend Bible Church arrives in 2 weeks and they have agreed to take on the project of reroofing the house with iron, which will help the mud on the house walls to have a chance to dry out and be a lot warmer for the family.
Florence had baby Maria 3 months ago in the village (you may recall I blogged about it at the time) Anyway we got to the village to be told by Alex that Richard had taken Florence and baby Maria on the carrier on the back of his push bike to the trading centre dr in the middle of the night and she nearly died.
We went and visited and she could hardly walk. We gave her bottled fresh water, some electrlytes and diastop pills to try and help her through the night. We went back in the morning to collect her and took her to the Dr in Wobulenzi. After examining her, he said she and the baby both had severe maleria (stage 3) severe dehydration and Florence had a severe infection from the birth 3 months ago! No wonder she nearly died! Florence and Maria stayed at the Dr's room all day as they pumped 4 hours of rehydration fluids and 2 hours of maleria treatment and antibiotics into her body. We had to go back to Mukono so we left her the transport to get a taxi back to the village.
We visited a week later and she is slowly getting back to normal, although, not surprisngly, she still alcks energy and gets very tired. Hopefully each day she will improve and be back to normal asap.
The children were sleeping on the ground on banana leaves and in the first picture above you can see Richard has been making beds for them. He has spent all his wages on medical expenses for Dolica (who was sick before the new baby arrived) and Florence who has had so many different health issues. He was unable to afford the mattresses for the children, so we told him if took the day off work to finish the beds, then we would supply the mattresses.