MyVoice
Notes from Conrad Mandsager

It’s Personal Now …
All too often, we view tragic and horrific incidents in Africa and other places around the globe with casual observance and a shrug of the shoulder. After all, those places are thousands of miles away and we don’t know those involved except by their pictures and the accounts we see and read in the news. Somehow it is relatively easy to push them away and find ways to dismiss them from our minds. Then we can go on with the busyness of our lives with nary a second thought.

Maybe you did not know this, but more than a million people in Africa -- mostly children – die each year from malaria. If you load that number into your calculator, that is about 2,740 dying each day!! Wen Kilama, a Tanzanian researcher, put it even more graphically, “Imagine seven Boeing 747s filled mostly with children crashing into Mount Kilimanjaro each day, and you begin to get an idea of malaria’s horrifying toll.”

So why is it that America and the western world can be brought to its knees by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, but hardly sheds a tear knowing that nearly the same number, mostly children, die each day of a manageable disease called malaria? Why did we all feel the horror, pain, and shock of that day, but seem to have no problem going to sleep at night knowing that thousands have died that day in Africa? Maybe it is just not personal enough yet.

In this newsletter, you will read the story of Sunday Patricia and her baby, Kakanyero Junior. To many, her story is just one of thousands about young girls in some far away country who has suffered as a result of war. To me, her story is much more than that – it is deeply personal. You see, now that she is a student at Lukodi Center and now that I have come to know her and Junior, she is no longer just a statistic. She now is like a daughter who I care deeply about. Her pain was so raw and palpable when I saw her for the first time in June at our medical clinic. I choked up when I saw how scared and worried she was for the life of her baby. I could not imagine the despair she must have felt day in and day out to see him slowly starving to death. She was so ashamed that she did not have enough milk to keep him alive. Fortunately, two of our summer interns, Rebekah and Brittany, were able to offer her immediate help by buying her formula and showing her how to feed Junior with it. A couple of months later, as we began to screen girls to come to the residential program, I made sure that Patricia was given one of those fifteen slots. What a thrill it is today to see the smile on her face and to see her love her baby knowing that she does not have to worry about his very survival anymore.

Because of you and your support, 30 girls like Sunday Patricia and 41 children like Junior are not statistics in news accounts any more. Their lives are markedly different and now it’s personal.