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| David |
Happy New Year - to all our friends, from Anchalee, all the
kids and myself. 2012 was a good year and we have had many things to be
grateful for. We have a good house, and we are making progress with our
agricultural projects that will help us become self-supporting. And most of all
we have a good family network here that has enabled us to have the kids well
attended at all times. Thank you to everyone who prayed for and supported us in
2012. Thank you to everyone who responded to our November newsletter that listed our projects and needs for 2013. May all your good works be returned to you in Grace. We will now be able to purchase some of the items we mentioned.
In October we brought home a new boy we named David. We
think he was about 3 weeks old at the time and premature (about 2.2kg). He had been
abandoned and left to die in the jungle, but he was saved by a caring neighbor
and taken to a pastor friend who then contacted us.
David was so weak form his hard beginning that we did not
realize that he had other medical issues. We brought him to the hospital in
November because of his difficulty breathing. At that point we learned that he
had Pneumonia and a collapsed lung. He was then brought to a larger hospital
where it was determined that he also had a heart condition. He has a hole
between his left and right ventricles which causes the blood to be pumped inefficiently
and forces his heart to work much harder.
David has been in the hospital ever since. And because Thailand’s
government hospitals do not provide full care like western hospitals; someone
has had to be by his side the entire time to give him oxygen, medicine, milk, and
provide basic care while he recovers. Anchalee has done 90% of this care, and
for this reason she has become my biggest hero, even more so than before. She
sleeps on a cement bench on a balcony just outside the room and has to cope
with, up to 30, very sick children crying on a continual basis. It is a sad
place to be at, but she has continued to be positive and helpful; being there
for the other moms who are also facing dire situations. You can see that the
other moms look up to her, and there is a family atmosphere in the section
around David’s bed.
David is going to need open heart surgery to fix the hole in
his heart, but the doctors are waiting for him to get a little older so that he
will be better able to undergo the procedure. He could come home with us,
except that he still has pneumonia and they won’t let him come home until that
is cleared up. The good news is that today they have taken him off oxygen,
which is a good sign, and they will test to see if he can be off oxygen entirely.
David smiled at Anchalee today - for the first time. He has come so far in the last few weeks. Please pray that his lungs
will fully recover, so we can work towards fixing up that leaky heart too.
To our friends we say, shine on you crazy diamonds!
