A life in danger always jumps to the top of our needs list and right now we need to save the life of a disabled child.  We can do this for $400.

www.aktenamit.org/donate (designate your “Immediate need” donation for Lorenzo)

Lorenzo is three years old and was born with club feet.  Corrective surgery could correct his disability but his family struggled to eat each day and expensive surgery was out of the question.  Until recently, he lay on his back, silent, day after day but not because of his club feet keeping him from squirming.  At age 3 he weighed only 24 pounds- the weight of a healthy 15 month old.  He was simply too weak to move.
 
His family lives in a rural Mayan village and rejected him because he would never be able to work in the fields or marry. In villages strapped by such crushing poverty, those who are too weak to care for themselves… well, you can imagine.
 

Dr. Omar, a doctor at Ak’ Tenamit’s clinic, was devastated when he learned about Lorenzo.  He says, “I knew that he would die in his village if he didn’t receive the operation.”  Many phone calls later, he had arranged for a surgeon to operate on little Lorenzo’s feet pro-bono.  In late December, Dr. Omar accompanied the family to a consulaton with the surgeon; he covered many of the family’s transportation expenses himself.  The diagnosis was disappointing.  Lorenzo was too malnourished to survive the anethesia and could not be operated on. 
 
What would happen to him now?  Ak’ Tenamit’s clinic has been monitoring Lorenzo for over a year.  They pleaded with his family to get his weight up. Our volunteer doctors even dug into their own pockets to purchase formula for him but Lorenzo never gained weight.  Following the news from the surgeon, Dr. Omar decided that the situation had gone on too long. 
 
He took charge of Lorenzo’s weight and kept Lorenzo at the clinic for several days.  Lorenzo received IVs until he could keep down formula and his weight gradually began to rise under the clinic’s watchful eye.  Doctors sent him back home with three months’ supply of a nutrient-rich formula that volunteers and health promoters pooled their own money to purchase.
 
It worked.  Three months later Lorenzo’s was healthy enough to undergo surgery.  On April 11, Lorenzo received the operation and it was a success.  He returns to the hospital every 2-3 weeks to have the casts on his legs changed.  His legs are becoming straighter and with therapy he will learn to walk.  He will be able to go to school, earn money for his family- even have a family of his own someday. 
 
Just as his family had committed to Lorenzo’s health, they may be forced to stop attending his treatment.  The cost to take a boat 4 hours to and from the hospital is just too much, even with the help they receive from the clinic.  $400 covers these cost and I urge you to please consider a donation.  Lorenzo has made huge gains but that doesn’t cut it in this part of the world.  Unless he completes his treatment and learns to walk his family will reject him for good and he may not see his fourth birthday.
 
To make a secure donation please visit www.aktenamit.org/donate and designate your “Immediate need” donation for Lorenzo.

On Wednesday our clinic received a phone call giving advanced warning about an in-coming patient with a serious-looking wound.

The patient was a young boy who had accidentally hacked his own knee with a dirty machete, likely while helping his father tend crops. Frightened by profuse bleeding and stranded in their village, his family phoned Ak’ Tenamit, which promptly sent an emergency boat.

The bleeding continued. When the boy finally arrived back at the clinic, he was carried ashore on what one of our clinic volunteers, Dr. Bezard, described as a “military stretcher from the Second World War” strewn with blood.

Together with another doctor, he thoroughly cleaned the wound, and administered anesthesia. The blood coagulations were manually removed, and a cauterization was performed on a spurting, severed artery.  He administered epinephrine to stop the bleeding and then sewed up the torn muscles and concluded with a strong skin suture.

Dr. Bezard was quick to point out that “knives and machetes are never clean” and did not let the boy leave without a hefty dose of antibiotic. Machete wounds are not unusual for the Q’eqchi Maya.  Those living in the Rio Dulce region are primarily subsistence farmers who rely on machetes for farming and chopping firewood. “If you have any cut here, it’s 99 % machetes- in all ages, even children.” 

Thanks to quick thinking by the boy’s parents and our clinic’s emergency service, this boy was able to be treated before his injury required hospital treatment, which his family would not have been able to afford.  Rural medicine at its best!