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When leaving office of Social Action one month ago, I was amazed at how God provided. Just a few days before, I heard the story of this orphan baby named Fleur and how no one in her family seemed to want her. Then one morning, I learned that the lady who was caring for her was refusing to do it any longer. Fleur needed a foster home, an she needed one quickly. Due to Social Action's limited resources, our Infants In Distress Porgram stepped in to help, and Rebeca stepped up to care for the child. We walked out of their building with a baby, and I was amazed at how God had provided. I called a village pastor, told him about our need for a foster family for Fleur, and encouraged him to engage the church to help. A few weeks later, he called me back with the story of a woman who was willing to take the baby, and I was amazed at how God had provided. So we went out to visit her in her home. We learned her name is Joceline, and she is an extraordinary Christian woman. Not only doe...

"Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but he Lord delivers him out of them all." Psalm 34:19 promises suffering. Afflictions are a guarantee. In a place ranked the seventh least developed nation in the world, where over half the population cannot read or write, where families live on less than $2 a day, where people die of preventable diseases because they do not have access to the most basic medical care, where mothers are too malnourished themselves to breastfeed their own babies, where girls and boys grow up without parents because of maternal mortality and the corruption of gold mines, where young women are exploited for sex, where Christians are persectuted and cast out of their own communities and families for believing in Jesus and abandoning their idols...people understand that suffering is a guarantee. That's not the question. The question is how we handle it. Just a few verses before the one written above, Psalm 34:5 teaches that the way of a Christ-...

Rosaline is a widow with a heart for orphans. Since her children are all grown, she takes in orphan babies and cares for them like they are her own. She has previously welcomed in two orphans and raised them, and now Sandrine, a twenty-two month old girl, is currently under her wings. She brought Sandrine to us this week because she had a large, fluid-filled growth on her chin that had advanced rapidly over the past four days. After taking her to a generalist in our town, he recommended further testing in another city, suspecting either an abscess or Burkitt's lymphoma. Rosaline was ready to do whatever it took for Sandrine. I'm not sure there is a limit to her love. Rosaline needed a day to prepare for the trip, so the following day we returned to the hospital to get the reference that would allow Sandrine to be seen in the nearest pediatric center in Gaoua. We waited, and waited, and waited. In the 105 heat. While the baby cried. Just when our patience had been tested t...

I saw her picture for the first time two weeks ago, and what I saw broke my heart. She is an orphan whose mother died in January when she was only 16 months old. After the funeral, the aunt took the child to our local social services to ask for help. Noticing that the child was frail, they referred her to an inpatient nutrition center right here in our city. Since our infants in distress program collaborates closely with both social services and the nutrition center, Rebeca heard about this child and went to visit. That's when she took the picture that she showed me. "Her name in Fleur," Rebeca said, which means Flower in French. She was sitting in the photo all alone, expressionless, like a sack of skin and bones, her eyes bulging from her emaciated face. To say this baby girl was "frail" was an understatement. The nutrition center helps monitor these babies and teaches their caregivers how to feed them according to their needs, but they do not provide around...

Names carry a lot of weight. Even in the United States, parents are naming their children more and more based on the meaning of the name instead of just what they like or what they think sounds good, but here in Burkina Faso, names have had powerful meanings for a long time. A name always means something, and you carry it with you for your entire life. They have a saying here that says, "the name will follow the child," which means that the name given is like a prophecy, even if it isn't a self-fulfilling one. What you are named is who you will become. This is why it is so troublesome and unfortunate that many people among our people group have horrible names. I've heard names such as "death will follow" and "the day of my sorrow." Take the example of a child named "bad things will follow." From his birth, he was severely developmentally delayed and became a burden to his mother. Even when he grew up, he dropped out of school and de...

A young girl sat quietly on a bench in the welcome area of the infants in distress office, a tiny baby cradled delicately in her lap. Her young husband sat beside her, twisting his hands as if this whole thing was very unfamiliar to him. I could see the light in their eyes mingled with uncertainty and wonder. One question confirmed what I already suspected. "First baby?" I asked with a smile. They both nodded. "How old is he?" I asked, holding out my hands to take him for a moment. "Seven days." She had come to our infants in distress office to ask for milk because her baby wasn't breastfeeding very well. With a simple assessment, I could tell that she was producing a more than sufficient supply of milk; she needed some help with latching. With Rebeca's help, we explained the incomparable value of a mother's milk (much better and cheaper than the powdered milk she wanted from us) and that we wanted to give her the tools to help her nour...

As many of you may already know, part of the infants in distress program includes a bi-monthly milk distribution: one in the village and the other right here in our city. At these distributions, all the babies are measured (height, weight, temperature, brachial perimeter - an indication of nutrition) and given a health check up before they receive a month's supply of milk. Each distribution also includes a session on health and hygiene education as well as a devotional, lesson, or story from the Bible. Last week in the village we had 10 present and only 2 absent, and today in the city we had 47 (including four sets of twins) and 8 absent. This makes for a current total of 67 in the program. More important than the numbers present are the ways that lives are being touched. Last week in the village, Rebeca gave an excellent health lesson about the importance of taking your children to the doctor as soon as they become sick instead of waiting until they become severely febrile o...

At 11:00 in the morning, the grandmother finally arrived with a baby tied to her back. We had been waiting for them all morning. A mixture of relief and urgency filled my lungs. Relief that they were finally here. Urgency because I saw the state of the child. Let me tell you some pieces of her story. Sabilan is a 1-year old baby girl in the infants in distress program whose mother died. She is cared for by her grandmother. Just a few months ago, an incident happened when a young girl who was watching Sabilan accidentally dropped her. When she fell, apparently on her head, she immediately started seizing. When Rebeca, the head of our infant program, heard about the incident, she instructed the father of the baby and the grandmother to take Sabilan to the hospital for a neurological assessment. Rebeca counseled them on three different occasions over the course of three months, but they never followed through because they said she was fine and had not had any further problems. This we...