David’s Story
As a family, we spent a year at St. Francis Hospital, Katete, Zambia in the early nineties. I was working as a medical officer, both in the hospital and one day a week in the community, under the watchful eye of James Cairns (revered as ‘Macairnsi’ locally) the medical superintendent and Faith his wife.
It was a fantastic experience for all the family, and also brought us much closer to one another. It was hard too – I felt very out of my depth after swapping General Practice for hospital medicine in the tropics.
Our 5 children were aged between 6 and 16; the younger boys having daily lessons with mum, the older 2 girls learning about life by looking after some orphaned babies living temporarily in a little room off Bethlehem, the maternity ward.
I could never cope with children dying, and it was this experience which eventually led to the founding of ‘Hands Around the World’.
Between Christmas and Easter the rainy season brought a huge influx of toddlers, many of them moribund often for a variety of frustratingly preventable reasons. A particularly poignant statement on the protocol for treating small children, which will always stay with me, was that those with a haemoglobin reading of more than 2gm/100ml should not be transfused unless they were in overt cardiac failure, as the potential risk of giving HIV+ blood was greater than their risk of death with a haemoglobin which should really have been 10gm or more!
One mother brought me to tears one evening as she thanked me for helping her infant who had then just died, wrapped his little body in her chitenge cloth, tied him to the carrier of her bicycle and walked off sobbing.
Then on another evening I was walking home from the children’s ward very angry with God. “What are you going to do about it?” I asked aloud, and immediately, and much to my surprise, I got the answer “What are you going to do about it?”. That is the moment when HATW changed from being an idea and a dream, into a very specific and urgent attempt to make a real difference to the lives of children in need.