Lovena - 21 years old weighing only 20 pounds

From the Children's Home.

Last Sunday evening Levi came to us and told us about a girl that he had seen that needed help and wondered how we could help her. We really weren't looking to take any more children in and didn't have the funds to put any more on our programs. I told Levi that the next day I would go see what I could do. He told me that it was a 16 year old girl that was crippled, severely malnourished, and no one was helping her.

I went to the grandmother's house the next morning but nothing Levi had said prepared me for what i saw!!! I have lived in Haiti for 3 1/2 years and have never seen anything close to how bad this girl was. As I approached I tried to hide my surprise. It was the skinniest girl that i ever have seen...her legs and arms were so skinny...her eye sockets were sunken in and she was just laying there with no clothes on the cement porch with flies in her face. The neighbors started to come when they saw that a blan (white person) was at the house. I started to ask some questions...

  Her name is Lovena. As a baby she was burned from a kerosene lamp. The scars on her face, arms, and leg show the evidence. The neighbors said since then, she has been sick...her mom and dad died a some years after this accident and since then she has been with her grandma. She is second to youngest in her family. As a I looked at her, I remembered that Levi said she was 16. I thought there was no way...she was so small. so I asked, "How old is she?" some of the neighbors said 20, some said 21. I was thinking that they would say she was younger than 16 not older!!!! I wanted to see if I could find out for sure if she was actually 20 years old. I asked where her younger brother was... they pointed to this young man that was standing there and said this is her younger brother. I sized him up and guessed he was either 18 or 19 so i asked how old he was. He said he is 18. I asked if he knew the age of his sister and he said 21. He also said he was the youngest in the family. I asked the grandma if she would be willing to let us take Lovena to the children's home for one month to feed and care for her. This would give me time to think of a long term plan for her without committing to something on the spot. The grandma just shrugged and said that would be fine as if she couldn't care less. I have never seen a case of such neglect...it looked like those pictures you see from the holocaust....maybe even worse.

We brought Lovena back to the children's home. Mary Ann gave her a bath and put some clean clothes on her. We weighed her.... she weighs just 20 lbs. in comparison, we have a healthy 23 month old girl here that weighs 25 lbs!! Her arm circumference above her elbow is just 4 inches and her leg circumference above her knee is just 4 1/4 inches!! she can't talk. I think this is from lack of care and from not being treated as a person. She does have some understanding. She doesn't appreciate people staring at her. And every time she sees food, she goes wild until she gets some. It seems so extreme that we just aren't sure what to do for her and it seems so impossible that she is still alive after so many years of being this way.

Please pray that we would have wisdom in knowing how to care for Lovena, especially for Mary Ann, her primary care giver. If you feel God leading you to help in this situation, please do! Some of our Haitian friends can't believe we would take somebody in like this...to them it seems hopeless. But we just need to remember that she has a soul and even though she can't talk, we can tell that she so desperately wants someone to love and care for her!

from the Children's Home,
Matt Newcomer