George's Story

About two weeks ago, I received a call from a local hospital asking for help. A boy had been dropped off in the emergency room several weeks before, gravely ill. He ended up having emergency surgery to repair a bowel obstruction. Six weeks had passed and he was improving, but the problem was they had no where to discharge him to. The entire time he had been in the hospital he had no visitors. He had been abandoned. 

As I walked onto the ward to meet him for the first time I found a shy, very thin teenage boy.  He looked up at me with a sweet smile and told me his name was George. As George continued to talk to me, telling me his story, my heart dropped. His father had died years before, his mother last July. For the last several months he had been forced to scavenge for work and food in the bush. He and a handful of other boys his age had banded together to try and survive. It was these friends who somehow were able to get him all the way to town, to the hospital just in time when he fell sick. 

I immediately called a friend at the Ministry of Social Welfare and notified her of the boy’s situation. Within a few hours, a social worker was at the hospital interviewing him and had already arranged for him to be placed (hopefully temporarily) in an orphanage. I was thankful it was an orphanage that we know well, with a director who has experience taking care of kids with special medical needs. 

A few days later, as I drove up to the orphanage to check on George, he met me at the car with that same, sweet smile. He was moving slowly, but had improved slightly from when I had seen him in the hospital. We talked for awhile and agreed that I’d come back to see him the next week.

The night before I was scheduled to go back and visit George, I received a frantic phone call from the orphanage director. George was very sick again. His stomach was swelling, and he couldn’t eat. I told the director to get George back to the emergency room as soon as possible. They took him to the hospital, but George’s incision had already re-opened. George has been readmitted to the hospital and is currently awaiting another surgery to fix the open wound. 

This boy has already been through so much trauma, and my heart breaks for him. He’s completely and utterly alone, and his health is a grave concern. Please join us in praying for him today.