On Januari 16 this year (2007) a little girl was brought to us. Being just 1 year old she only had a weight of less then 4 kilo's
Dr. Botha of the Anti Retroviral Treatment clinique investigated her medical condition and came to the conclusion that she would have little chance to survive. She had the most serious level of AIDS (level 4), had probly TB and was completely dried out.
Nevertheless he decided to get her on ART medication and we started taking care of the little girl. Especially a Dutch voluteer took her into her appartment and was taking care of her day and night.

In the beginning it was quite hard to get the little girl to swallow her medication, because she wasn't used to any liquid food at all, and to be true: the medication doesn't taste very nice also! But after a few weeks things she started to grow. She took several bottles of milk a day, a few weeks later more and more spoons of yoghurt and eventually her fast food. As soon as she got better, we could see that, although she still looked like a little baby, she actually was already one year old! She started to recognise people, discovered she could laugh and she grew more active every day. In the end she could sit right up and was laughing the whole day. Latest news this week is, that she has started to walk alongside tables and chairs.

Just to give you an impression of what only tree month of good care at the Holy Family Centre can for children like this, we present below a series of photo's, showing her development from January till the end of March.

 

And if you are curious how she developped since then, here are two quite recent pictures: