Heart, liver, and kidney failure. Brittle bones and skin. A deteriorating brain.
What if I told you this wasn’t the description of an elderly person, but a 2-year old girl on her death bed — a little girl suffering from starvation?
Long-term hunger is one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world, and it’s one of the main killers of children under 2. But little boys and girls don’t have to starve to death. Today, you can feed one child for an entire year for just $40. You can help save the life of someone like Adassa.
When our partners first met Adassa in Haiti, she weighed only 10 pounds — the average weight of a 2-month-old, not a 2-year-old.
She was so weak from malnutrition that she couldn’t even walk. Most kids her age love to run around and explore, but Adassa wasn’t like most toddlers. Lethargic and eerily still, she was too tired to even cry from her hunger pains.
And when a nurse measured her body mass, she was in the “red zone.”
What’s the red zone? Well, a special measuring tape is used to determine whether a child is healthy. A nurse will wrap a measuring tape around the child’s upper arm. The tape is divided into three sections — green, yellow, and red.
If the child’s measurement is in the green section, she is considered healthy. But as the nurse tightened the tape around Adassa’s skinny arm, it slid past the green … then past the yellow. Finally, it stopped in the red — she was severely malnourished.
Adassa was lucky to even be alive.
Already every bone of her tiny ribcage was visible through her skin. And when the nurse pressed the stethoscope to Adassa’s back, her heartbeat wasn’t as strong as it should be.
Fortunately, Adassa received the nutrition she needed and is doing much better. But there are many other children just like her who are still in the red zone.
Fortunately, childhood hunger can be combated, and YOU can help!
Your $40 will provide food for a child for an entire year! You can help make sure one boy or girl lives to see another birthday.
For mothers living in impoverished countries like Guatemala, Haiti, and Uganda, the death of a child is normal. That’s because starvation and malnutrition are everyday realities. But no mother should have to lose a child when the cause of death is 100 percent preventable.
Will you help feed one child for a year? For $40, you can rescue a child from the red zone and give peace of mind to a mother.